Dwell Material Sourcebook 2014

special issue

An Exploration of Building Modern

Architects’ Advice on Wood, Concrete, and More

Material Sourcebook

Material Sourcebook 172 Pages Featuring Innovative Projects

SPECIAL ISSUE / SPRING 2014

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NTS MATERIAL SOURCEBOOK CONTEN 9 168

Wood Go beyond classic clapboard with charred cedar, locally sourced pine, thrifty plywood, and other refreshing variations of a building staple.

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Q&A: Sebastian Mariscal Facade Focus

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Editor’s Note Sourcing

Metal The right design makes metal homes—despite their cold connotations—supremely sustainable, livable, and sturdy in the face of extreme weather conditions.

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Q&A: Tom Kundig Facade Focus

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3 30 Wood Drift A cypress-clad home in Amagansett, New York, undergoes a subtle yet transformative reenovation en n by architect Page Gool olri rick ck to accommodate a gro rowi wing n family and embra ace its coastal surroundiings gs.

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Glass 73

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The quintessential transparent modernist shell (think Farnsworth House or Glass House) is as suited to everyday life as it is to a museum.

74 Q&A: Thomas Phifer 103 Facade Focus

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M ATERIAL SO O URCEBOOK

O the Cover: On C : Architect T Terunob bu Fujiimori uttilizes c charred cedar for the Coal House in H n Kiyossumi, Jap pan. The process used p u to o create charred ccedar prrotects the clad dding frrom thee elemeents and d results in n a uniq que faccade, p. 34. m Fried dberg Photo by P y Adam

MATERIAL SOURCEBOOK CONT T ENTS

160 Fiber Rich Architect Michael Cobb uses eSIPs, ecological panels made of wood and straw, to craft a superinsula l ted house in California at remains e that th comfortable at any temperrature, without compromising g aesthetics.

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Concrete CONCRETE

105 We share five inspiring conc cre ete residences that offer myria ad solutions for high-design, low wmaintenance living. 106 Q&A: Marcio Kogan 135 Facade Focus

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THE EXTRAS

The Extras: Earth, Stone, Plastic, Composite 137 There is no one-size-fits-all in architecture: From marble to laminate, material options abound. We explore how a few homeowners found the perfect fit. 138 Q&A: Richard Meier 167 Facade Focus

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EDITOR’S NOTE

Material Sourcebook

Good designers know that a deep understanding of a material will always yield a better outcome, no matter the project. The properties of a particular material—how it will perform, how it will age, how it will provide stability or evoke transparency—must be respected and acknowledged from the very beginning, and this knowledge can be acquired only through curiosity and rigorous testing. This special issue is our tribute to the successful culmination of these ideals; our presentation of projects represents superlative work with innovative material expression at its core. We chose to organize the issue by material—wood, metal, glass, concrete, and more—and comb through our favorite stories from years past to fnd a diverse cast of case studies that prove that “modern” does not necessarily equal “glass box.” This notion plays itself out throughout the issue. Let us begin with glass. Our conversation with architect Thomas Phifer (page 74) illustrates that glass can be used expansively to create a pavilion, or more measuredly to frame particular views. A case in point is a renovation in upstate New York by designer Tom Givone (page 86)—this is certainly not a Philip Johnson–inspired glass house but rather a 200-year-old farmhouse with a single foor-to-ceiling glass wall that adds a modern touch (and an incredible view) without completely upending its aesthetic. Continuing with the theme of what “modern” means, we devoted an entire chapter to materials that go beyond the usual suspects of glass, concrete, and steel (page 137). We are excited to DWELL

highlight rammed earth deployed in New Mexico (page 140) as well as eSIPs, ecological structural insulated panels, used as cladding on a never-before-published home in Healdsburg, California (page 160). Both projects remind us that material exploration is exciting when it is coupled with an architect’s clear-eyed assessment of site, region, and a client’s desires. Other stories herald venerable materials used in an adventurous way, as in architect Jeanne Gang’s Brick Weave House in Chicago (page 158) and dmvA Architecten’s two-story home in Belgium (page 167). In each case, bricks were used as a decorative element as well as a structural one, to create facades that dazzle and serve as signifcant conversation starters. We are proud to include Victor Prado’s photography to introduce each chapter. We chose Victor for his humanistic touch and his efortless grasp of graphic craft. There is a warmth and honesty to the way he has rendered collections of raw material—no objectifying here. It was important to us to see the materials and evoke the tactile, in hopes that readers might imagine possible projects of their own. Notice also how Victor was able to create a 45-degree shadow in his images, and how that ties into the navigation system throughout the issue. In the words of our creative director, Jeanette Abbink, it’s just so damn satisfying to see the chapter demarcation lines next to the shadow on the page. It is this reverence for detail that prompted us to create an issue devoted to materials. The truth of a building is revealed through the choices of its maker. When a designer focuses on expressing the potential of a material— rather than fghting it—everything else seems to fall in place. Amanda Dameron, Editor-in-Chief [email protected] Follow me on Twitter: @AmandaDameron

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Wood

Wood is plentiful, ancient, and basic—but far from boring. Here we’ve rounded up a diverse array of residences built from native forests in Sweden, Massachusetts, Japan, Canada, and Long Island that all make primary use of the noble element. DWELL

Photo by Victor Prado

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text by Kelsey Keith The “hidden fortress” feeling of Sebastian Mariscal’s Wabi House (below) is reinforced by a charred-wood fence around the perimeter of the property. The house in Southern California—with its several types of wood in addition to the burned cedar (below right)— relies on Japanese principles of wabi-sabi.

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Sebastian Mariscal Architect Sebastian Mariscal believes that when it comes to wood, everyone’s a fan. Mariscal’s sensitive, atmospheric homes broadcast a deep understanding of the organic material. Each of the four Mariscal-designed residences Dwell has featured in its pages express a mastery of timber, from the warm, ipe-clad interior of 2inns (2006) to the charred-wood exterior of the Wabi House (2008). He manages to make the most of everyday materials, both distinct and clever, and we wanted to fnd out how.

MATERIAL SOURCEBOOK

In 2inns, a house that Mariscal initially designed for his family in San Diego, the master bedroom opens onto a small ipe-lined patio. The exterior cladding also makes up the walls and foor of the bedroom, further inviting the outside in (below).

How do you diferentiate the use of wood so it does not look static? I’m always excited to experiment. Especially in the case of Wabi House, where we used charred wood. I had gone to Japan several years before I started working on Wabi House and learned about the method. I was just amazed by how diferent the wood looks and feels, from a very matte black on the bark to silvers that depend on the sunlight.

dwell.com/sebastian-mariscal Head online to see a roundup of the architect’s transcendent wood houses.

PHOTOS BY DANIEL HENNESSY (WABI HOUSE), CORAL VON ZUMWALT (DWELL HOME VENICE), AND BRUCE DUFFY (2INNS)

What’s your favorite way to employ it in a space? I like to do one whole room in wood, so you feel contained. Or I like to clad the whole exterior—like the Dwell Home Venice—in cedar with a dark stain, so it feels like one giant piece of wood. I don’t use it as an accent: It distracts you from experiencing what the architecture wants you to experience. What materials complement wood? Wood is very warm, so it’s nice when you contrast it with a material that is not as warm. I love how it works with concrete, for example, and stone. Wood is soft, so put in contrast with a strong material, the richness of wood becomes more alive than being by itself. Why do you think people use such a traditional building material, even for modern projects? Wood is one of the noblest materials, one that people relate to, perhaps from nostalgia. More and more, society is adopting a “less maintenance” attitude toward building materials. But there is no synthetic material that has the qualities of wood. DWELL

“I like to try and master the material on a specifc project, rather than mastering the material forever.” 13

Q&A

How did you master the element? I have done a lot of wood buildings and interiors, but I take a humble position with materials. You never really master it—and once you think you have, there is no longer a respect there. Also, we are builders, with our own crew and everything, so I’ve gotten a lot of experience being hands-on and actually building what I design with wood. The other thing that helps a lot is to do mock-ups for the siting of a house. It helps anticipate how efciently the material is going to work.

“I love to combine diferent types of wood,” Mariscal says of the Dwell home he designed in Venice, California (below left). “It’s not very common, but it’s something [George] Nakashima used to do.” The kitchen is sheathed in custom woodwork from Semihandmade, topped with Caesarstone countertops (left).

WOOD

What do you appreciate about wood? I like the ease of wood versus other materials, which can be hard to adapt to your specifc needs. You can grab a tool and cut it, and adjust throughout construction. You can’t do that with steel and glass. Wood is connected to craft. With glass, which is made in a factory, you don’t see its hand. With wood, you see alignment of the screws and how it was planed, and that connects to humanity. I also like the aging process. It’s one of the most ancient materials, and the most adaptable.

text by Grant Gra nt Gibson photos by Pia Ul Ulin in

project Bornstein Residence architect Bornstein Lyckefors Architekter er location Gothen Got henbur burg, Sweden publisshed May 2010

Knotty By Nature

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sits ts on Per Bornstein’s house si a hill between a large forested park and Gothenburg’s former industrial zone. Much of the surrounding area awaits design as thoughtful and lovely as this home built on a previi ously abandoned lo ot.

In snowy Sweden, where pine planks and the democratic design incubator Ikea reign supreme, a local architect pays homage to his patrimony, making a small, slatty home feel like a rather big deal.

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“I hadn’t really dug into wood before,” architect Per Bornstein explains as we begin a tour of his house. “Then you realize there’s so much wood in Sweden. It’s a cheap material. Everybody can use it. It ages beautifully and it’s instantly cozy. From then on it was just a case of going all the way.” And go all the way he most certainly did. The house lies on the outskirts of Gothenburg on a previously disused pocket of land. “It had become the local dump,” remembers Bornstein. “And when it came to be excavated, the builders found bicycles; there were meters of old garden rubbish. So I think most of the neighbors felt it was nice that it was being used.” He chose the area for economic as well as personal reasons. “I grew up ten minutes from here, and we were looking for houses in this part of the city because they were still reasonably cheap. We saw this ad, and we just called.” From the east-facing front windows the city sprawls out. Nearby is a bland-looking residential tower block; below that, a spaghetti junction of roads, rail, and tram lines skirt the Göta River, once home to a trio of enormous shipyards. To the south, however, lies a large, forested park where huge chunks of granite burst into the small, untamed garden. The site is an intriguing intersection of urban and rural, one that the house toys with adroitly. The material from which it is primarily constructed clearly references the Scandinavian landscape, but its shape belongs to the machine age. Bornstein compares it to a hollowed-out tree stump; I’m not so sure. From the outside, it looks like a 1,400-square-foot timber-paneled box cutting into a slope. The modernist infuence is not too difcult to detect, of course, and is confrmed by a quick scan of the vast number of books in Bornstein’s downstairs study. Though there are monographs galore, one name leaps out. “Every time I come to a building by Le Corbusier, it’s like”—he exhales heavily for dramatic efect—“it’s like a diferent league. You’ve come to a Champions League football match, and you realize that until then you’ve been watching kids play.” This isn’t a large house, and in a move of Corbusian efciency, Bornstein took pains to maximize the use of the available space. Much of the design is about subtraction—there is a noticeable lack of doors and blinds, for example. Rooms seem to blend elegantly into each other—the architect himself rather cutely uses the analogy of the rooms “borrowing” one another’s space—and Bornstein positioned the mirrors to increase the sense of scale. “The whole idea is to make the spaces feel as large as possible,” he says. Importantly, too, there’s a distinct lack of clutter. A couple works of art lean against the walls, but otherwise, it’s the timber panels that really articulate the owner’s taste. “I don’t like having that much stuf,” he confrms. “It’s a very functional house. I guess everything is functional when you live in 1,400 square feet.” Though his modern infuences and yen for a small space go some way toward explaining the form, the choice of material was boiled down to both 16

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bottom), and the weathered facade (opposite top) is punctured by a variety of diferently sized windows: Those fush to the wall indicate the house’s public rooms, while those for the private spaces are set back.

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Bornstein and his daughter, Velma, sit at a table the architect designed himself; the dining chairs were designed by Arne Jacobsen for Fritz Hansen. Exposed pine dominates the downstairs reception area (opposite

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The frst thing visitors see upon entering the house is Bornstein’s impressive collection of architecture and design books (left). Bornstein designed the sofa and chair for Swedese. Though the house is a mostly wooden afair, a sense of transparency pervades, thanks to many windows and the glass front door (opposite). The ground foor has a guest bedroom for when Velma has friends over to stay. The bathroom includes a sink Bornstein found in a secondhand store. Competing grains of laminated pine panels enliven the stairs.

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context and practicality. “We didn’t intend to put that much cash in, so the house had to be cheap,” Bornstein says. “We were looking at industrial buildings—like steel beams—but they tend to age very poorly. We looked at concrete, too, but we knew these builders—they’re more like friends—and we really wanted to work with them. They were keen to use wood, so that’s what led us to the material.” As Bornstein talks, the eagle-eyed among you will notice the references to “we.” When the project started in 2005, he was married to an interior designer; by 2007, however, they had separated. Their daughter, Velma, lives with Bornstein every other week. The former couple’s relationship is amicable now, and Bornstein is sincere when he shares credit for all the design decisions. Split between two levels, the majority of walls are clad in two-by-eight-foot boards of untreated glued-laminated pinewood. “There’s no painting, nothing,” he says. “It’s straight out of the package.” The upstairs ceiling is fnished in plywood, so the only areas of the house not fnished in timber are the external walls of the basement, which are made from concrete blocks. It’s unfussy and just a little raw around the edges. “I like the idea that everything is what it is. Nothing is enclosed. If it’s a radiator, then it’s a radiator. If it’s a light ftting, then it’s a light ftting. In the end, it makes the house very easy to understand.” Upstairs is Velma’s room, Bornstein’s slightly larger bedroom, and a bathroom. The light-flled open plan that dominates the top foor contains a wood-burning stove at one end and, at the other, a dark brown oak kitchen from Ikea that in turn leads out onto a deck in the garden. In between are the dining and living rooms. Downstairs there is a spare bedroom suite (for when Velma entertains) that Bornstein occasionally uses as an ofce for his architectural practice. The general sense of reduction extends to the color palette, too. Weary of what they seemed to see everywhere, the couple decided that nothing should be stainless steel or white. “We had a hard time fnding a toilet that was gray rather than white,” he says. It also took Bornstein six months to fnd a suitably colored bathtub. “I’d rather have an empty room than stuf I don’t like.” As the light fades, the character of the house and the city that stretches out beneath it changes. Streetlights twinkle and the timber box begins to glow. “I think in the end we were the right buyers,” Bornstein concludes. “If someone had bought it and built a standard catalog house, it probably wouldn’t have worked out very well because it was a difcult spot. But since we drew the house from the conditions on the site, it came out very well.” It’s hard to disagree. Though the house undoubtedly owes a debt to the Continental innovations of Le Corbusier, it also has a typically Scandinavian sense of warmth that allows it to negotiate the boundary between the postindustrial and rural landscapes with all the ease, and pragmatism, of a seasoned diplomat.

Blue in the Facade

Canada’s Magdalen Islands offer a seaside retreat to landlocked Quebecers, two of whom have turned the local vernacular on its oreille with a winsome wood-framed home.

text by Aaron Britt photos by Matthew Monteith

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After a bumpy ride out of Montreal on Air Canada Jazz—a feet of tiny planes with a service schedule as capricious and unpredictable as a Coltrane solo— we touch down on the windswept and largely treeless Havre-aux-Maisons, one of Canada’s six interconnected Magdalen Islands. This little archipelago of red crags and endless dunes in the Gulf of St. Lawrence has a small year-round population, but has become quite the summer destination for Quebecers, like a rugged, Francophone Cape Cod but with fewer miniature-golf courses. Dirt (and often sand) roads are common, a local delicacy is harp seal (a fatty, fshy red meat that’s better than you might expect), fences serve only to pen in the few tranquil cattle, and the rolling green hills and lush meadows are sparsely dotted with humble farmhouses. Unassuming and architecturally uniform though they may be, the magenta, canary-yellow, and even black houses provide the Magdalen Islands’ residential character. Local lore suggests that the sometimes outlandishly colored houses were borne of maritime necessity. Fishermen painted them the same colors as their boats and used their homes as reference points when sailing. Though navigation techniques are markedly more sophisticated today, the lively paint jobs have hardly run aground. The eye-catching blue of the modest 1,690-squarefoot vacation home owned by Montreal residents Yves DWELL

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Bériault and Diane Decoste (a native Magdalen Islander) is very much of a piece with the rest of Havre-auxMaisons’ vibrant residences. “We wanted something lively for the house, something spectacular but not vulgar, so we looked at yellows and reds,” says Bériault. “I was a bit more conservative color-wise, but Diane and Marie-Claude took over, and I know now that they were right.” Decoste and architect Marie-Claude Hamelin, of the Montreal frm YH2, settled on a cerulean blue inspired by the sea, the sky, and, as Hamelin puts it, “a child’s chalk. The architecture on the islands is rather naive, so we wanted to evoke that childlike quality in the color.” When the structure was built in 1915, it was put to use as a one-room schoolhouse. By the time Bériault and Decoste bought it from a friend and neighbor, it was yellow, metal-clad, and hardly representative of the local architecture. “We didn’t know how nice the original structure was until we started to renovate,” says Hamelin. Tearing out what proved to be a false ceiling revealed a high, arched open space that the architects were desperate to keep. The building’s bones required little work—the architects even managed to keep the pine interior, whitewashing it to better set of the residents’ art collection—and by 2003 Bériault and Decoste had a wonderfully open living room and kitchen space with a small suspended ofce and a vaulted ceiling soaring some 35 feet above.

Bériault and Decoste make a meal of local treats (right). The ofce space above the kitchen (above) looks out onto the great room (opposite). The high, pitched roof and neutral walls give the space an open, tranquil feel, making it a desirable spot for the couple to pursue two of their passions: classical music and literature.

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The view from the master bedroom down the long cedar corridor into the living room is one of the home’s real pleasures. Glimpsed from outside (opposite), it becomes clear how the corridor fows through both structures at its uncommon angle.

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Geometrie Bleu Upper Level Floor Plan

“I wanted to walk into the house and actually smell the architecture.”—Marie-Claude Hamelin, architect

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Restoring the house to its original form was something of a coup, but it’s what YH2 did behind the house that’s so impressive. Houses in the Magdalen Islands are often square afairs, with smaller outbuildings situated just behind. “In the old houses you’d have the main house and then, about 20 feet away, a small duplicate,” says Bériault. “It was used as a storehouse to dry fsh or keep cranberries.” These tiny replicas still abound, though now they more likely house lawn mowers or tandem kayaks. Hamelin and her YH2 partner Loukas Yiacouvakis reimagined the traditional storehouse as a cozy domestic space rather than the destination of freezing midwinter dashes for more salted cod. As they built the storehouse-inspired structure, they increased the usual size to accommodate a master bedroom with a bathroom below. The spacious bathroom with a roomy tub opens onto a sitting area littered with books and magazines, a literary antechamber to a nice long soak. The view from the sliding glass door, a private entrance to the second house, looks out onto green pastures, a verdant hillock, and a small canal through which boats pass as they head out to sea. This intimate space is linked to the main house by a richly hued, almost orange cedar corridor that looks like an errant boxcar that has come to rest at an oblique angle between the two structures. Doors at either end of the corridor ofer privacy to each end of the house. “We

wanted to do two houses like you see all over the Magdalen Islands,” Hamelin says. “Instead of the storehouse idea, we took our inspiration for the second house from those small beach cabanas used for changing. We want Yves and Diane to feel as though they’ve just come from the beach to this small, intimate space.” Cedar was a clear choice, not only for its contrast to the blue of the exterior, but also because Hamelin and Yiacouvakis wanted to work with a natural material that would lend itself to the island’s aesthetic. “I wanted to walk into the house and actually smell the architecture.” The second house and cedar corridor dealt deftly with the main house’s small footprint, but the biggest puzzler was the basement beneath—a shabby space half sunken below ground level that Bériault and Decoste transformed into a guest apartment with two small bedrooms, an undersized common room, and a petite kitchen. “It’s just a little something for guests with pretty simple Ikea decor,” says Bériault, but he proudly points out the living room’s massive chalkboard, a nod to the building’s original function. “Once you understand these islands,” Bériault says of the couple’s admiration for the local vernacular, “you realize that you can’t just pick up an architecture magazine and fnd some crazy thing you like and say, ‘I want that.’ There’s a certain naiveté, almost a childlike quality, about the architecture here, which we love, and we have to respect that.”

Bériault enjoys some leisure time in the lounge beneath the master bedroom (right). The porthole window in the master bedroom (above) not only evokes the sea, it also looks out onto it. A small deck of the back of the main house (opposite) is protected from the wind and supported by a small grassy mound.

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A couple embark on a thorough— but highly respectful—renovation of their longtime dream house with architect Page Goolrick k.

text by Arlene Hirst photos by Pia Ulin project Dune House architect Gene Futterman renovation architect Page Goolrick Architect location Amagansett, New York

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The cypress-clad Amagansett home designed by architect Gene Futterman in the 1970s sports an unusual profle with triangular peaks and valleys above beachfront dunes (opposite). A renovation by Page Goolrick includes the addition of a deck with a chlorine-free pool (above) and triangular guesthouse.

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For several years, a group of young New Yorkers banded together to spend summer weekends in the town of Amagansett, a charming village on the South Fork of Long Island. Over time, two of them fell in love. In 1999, he proposed to her on the beach, near an imposing, cypress-clad house that they fantasized about owning. Soon, they decamped to London for work, but they missed their Long Island summers and often came back for vacations. On one trip, they discovered that their special house was for sale. Their frst impulse was to buy it. But they knew it was a wildly impractical idea and decided against it. When they returned the following summer, the house was still on the market. “It was falling down; it was a wreck,” she says. “But we always felt we would love it to be our house, and we found ourselves in a better position to take it on.” The house needed lots of repairs, but they bought it anyway. The couple weren’t interested in something

bigger or grand; they wanted what was already there, only in better shape. A friend recommended Page Goolrick. “She seemed to get it immediately,” says the wife, who formed a close bond with the Manhattanbased architect. “We were on the same wavelength.” The 1,700-square-foot house—which Gene Futterman designed in the 1970s and, from the outside, looks like a series of irregular triangles—is sited on a dune just a few hundred yards from the Atlantic Ocean. Honoring the owners’ wishes, Goolrick cleaned up the wood-flled interior spaces and added more usable space on the exterior in the form of a two-story mahogany deck with a swimming pool, pool house, and outdoor shower. Goolrick reworked the entry, a meandering stairway that seems to foat over the landscape. “Steps leading to the main house were designed to hover above the sand so one is aware of the dune while ascending, and the structure treads lightly on the ground,” she says. 31

The shelving surrounding the freplace in the double-height living room (above left) has eight diferent depths to accommodate a chimney, two closets, a television, stereo equipment, and an attached desk on the second foor. A Dean sectional sofa from Room & Board is paired with an antique Boomerang chair. Sons Owen and Walker strike a pose in the stairwell, one of the few places in the house that are clad in wallboard (above right). To illuminate the space, Goolrick installed large windows and a skylight. The adjacent dining room and kitchen (left) sport a six-bulb Branching Bubble chandelier by Lindsey Adelman Studio. Custom cabinetry is faced in Douglas fr plywood for the cooking zone and cypress for the cleanup zone. Durable, tactile bluestone tile is used throughout the frst foor.

MATERIAL SOURCEBOOK

hewn Douglas fr plywood, which Goolrick compares to “art packing crates.” Bluestone covers the public foors throughout the ground foor. With solar panels on the roof, a geothermal heating system, and operable skylights for ventilation and natural cooling, the house is designed to be green. “It’s a second home, and we fy a long distance to get here,” says the wife, “so we wanted to be as sensitive to the environment as possible.” Another Goolrick touch is a wood-and-steel screen that runs the length of the south glass facade, inviting in low winter sun while shielding the space from hot summer rays. Much like a ship, where every corner is used, the house features myriad nooks, crannies, and builtins, from trundle bunk beds for the couple’s two boys to a laundry center tucked under the stair and wallmounted toilets in the bathrooms. Goolrick also installed pocket doors throughout—a space saver that underscores the idea of the house as one big room.

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She made no grand interventions but used subtle tweaks to great efect throughout the house, transforming it in the process. The double-height living room still dominates the frst foor, but she added cypress-clad casework to frame and defne the space. “When designing homes near the beach,” Goolrick says, “I minimize the amount of Sheetrock, opting for materials that allow for expansion and contraction to celebrate the efect salt air has on a structure.” The house is basically “just one big room with a bunch of places to sleep,” says the wife. To maximize the space, the architect adjusted the existing master bedroom and guest room—both sited on the second foor, overlooking the main living space—and added a scant 150 square feet to the back of the house. The family and their many guests congregate in the south-facing, open-plan living area. A simple galley kitchen runs the length of one wall, where a workstation across from the galley is constructed from rough-

Sconces by David Weeks illuminate the custom marine plywood storage wall—built by Ciufo Carpentry—that divides the master bedroom from the open bathroom (far left). All of the ceilings and foors in the upstairs bedrooms are clad in wide-plank walnut, because, says Goolrick, “it’s soft and warm.” The boys’ bunk room (left) is decked out with animalprinted bed linens from Dwell Studio. Blue Jieldé sconces enable reading at bedtime.

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dwell.com/dune-house Head online to see more photos of Page Goolrick’s Amagansett revamp.

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Pool Deck Kitchen Living Room Bedroom

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Bathroom Master Bedroom Master Bathroom Pool House Outdoor Shower

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Terunobu Fujimori’s Yakisugi House in Nagano, Japan, was completed in 2007. The entire home is clad in charred cedar boards, treated with an ancient Japanese technique called shou-sugi-ban that seals the wood against rain and rot.

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MATERIAL SOURCEBOOK

A modern eccentric with a sensibility drawn from ancient Japanese traditions, architect Terunobu Fujimori deals in sophisticated craft, like the charred cedar that is one of his hallmarks. DWELL

architect Terunobu Fujimori published May 2009

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Back in Black

text by Jaime Gillin photos by Adam Friedberg

One of the frst things you notice about the Japanese architect and architectural historian Terunobu Fujimori is his voracious appetite. His particular brand of hunger extends not only to food—which he devours swiftly and animatedly, crumbs fying Cookie Monster–style—but also to an ardent intellectual curiosity about the world, especially as it relates to architecture, his all-consuming passion for more than 30 years. A longtime professor at the Institute of Industrial Science at the University of Tokyo, Fujimori came to designing late—he got his frst commission at age 44, 19 years ago—but he has since conceived some of Japan’s most startlingly original buildings. Leading the way to his ofce at the university (he calls it his “laboratory”), he walks swiftly and steadily, as if propelled on a Segway, his salt-and-pepper hair waving behind him. We sit at a table sipping green tea, and Fujimori thumbs through his sketchbook, discussing the atypical genesis of his career while gobbling tea cookies and sketching almost continuously with a blue pencil. Fujimori grew up in a tiny rural village two hours south of Nagano, where he helped care for the surrounding forests, as the villagers have done for more than 400 years. He studied architectural design in college but quickly became disillusioned by the lack of hands-on technical training—he was more interested in building than in design, he realizes now—and moved to Tokyo to pursue a PhD, spending the next 20 years as a scholar of modern Japanese architectural history. Fujimori fell into designing buildings after his native village commissioned him to work on a small history museum for a local family with ancient ties to the area. As he pondered what form the building should take, he felt the weight of all of history bearing down on him. “Since I was a famous architectural historian,” he says, “I thought my architecture should be totally unique, dissimilar to any that came before. I fgured that if I did something traditionally European or Japanese, everyone would say, ‘Oh, it’s because he’s a historian.’ I didn’t want that criticism.” But at the same time, he rejected anything too contemporary. 35

In another of Fujimori’s charred cedar projects, Coal House (below), a tearoom protrudes from the second story, accessible from the exterior by a timber ladder that appears to pierce the roof and via a secret interior door in the master bedroom. The

climb (right) is purposely precarious. Fujimori wants visitors to “be a little afraid” of the route, a “device to make you feel and think diferently.” Inside, the tiny tearoom with a low ceiling (above) is like an adult clubhouse, designed for intimate conversation.

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His peers found the building intriguing. “Fujimori has thrown a punch of a kind no one has ever seen before at ‘modernism,’” wrote the architect Kengo Kuma. Encouraged, Fujimori decided to continue designing. With no other clients in sight, he built a house for his family in a Tokyo suburb. Inspired by the plant-covered thatched roofs prevalent in Normandy, the Tanpopo (Dandelion) House has strips of volcanic rock afxed to the facade, with fowers and grass blooming in the grooves between them. The thick walls mean that the house is extremely well insulated and efcient, a by-product of the design rather than a direct goal. While Fujimori admits that his buildings tend to be ecologically sensitive and extremely energy-efcient, he is wary of the contemporary conception of green design. “As an architect, I deal with the visual efects. Energy conservation is an engineer’s work. My intention is to visibly and harmoniously connect two worlds—the built world that mankind creates with the nature God created.” Along those lines, he designed a 1,080-squarefoot concept house for the Tokyo Gas Company Ltd., Japan’s largest natural gas provider. Coal House uses exclusively gas-powered appliances and is full of quirky details: Squat, hobbit-scaled doors conceal a bathroom (you need to duck to enter), and a tiny tearoom hangs of the second story like a jutting upper lip, echoing the silhouette of his earlier Yagisugi House from 2007. Both projects are extraordinarily striking, thanks in large part to their expressive exterior siding in charred cedar—the product of an ancient Japanese technique that seals the wood against rain and rot but is seldom used by contemporary architects. This is in part because it’s labor-intensive and, though efective, it’s considered primitive. It takes seven minutes to char three boards, starting by packing newspaper into the base of bound-together planks. Once a fre is lit, a craftsman uses a tool to coax the fame, ensuring even charring. After water is poured over the boards to halt the process, they continue to crackle and smoke—a delicate balance between just enough burning and too much. “No educated architect would use this material,” says Fujimori with pride, grinning broadly. DWELL

“My intention is to visibly and harmoniously connect two worlds—the built world that mankind creates with the nature God created.”—Terunobu Fujimori, architect

Aside from materials, little about the way Fujimori works is conventional. He doesn’t have a frm per se but recruits graduate students to help him fesh out the details of each project after he’s done the drawings. He makes architectural models by hacking tree stumps into abstract, sculptural shapes with a chain saw. And when he’s completed the fnal drawings for a project, he invites clients to his weekend house in Nagano for a special ceremony. Sitting in his Too-High Tea House, perched 20 feet in the air and wavering on two forked tree trunks, he hands them a hand-rendered version of the plans. “If they don’t like my design, I shake the building!” he laughs. Fujimori also handles many fnish details himself with a group of volunteers he calls Jomon Company— so named for the Neolithic period of Japanese history and for the simple tools they use to give Fujimori’s interiors a warm, roughed-up feel. He’s spent the past several years roaming the globe for new but related ideas, applying his historian’s mind to collect inspiration from other ancient models: mud architecture in Mali, adobe buildings in the American West, and the Caves of Lascaux in southwest France. These spare, stripped-down structures remind us that we all share primal instincts—for shelter, warmth, and community—that can be aroused and satisfed through design. Fujimori’s modern interpretation of the Neolithic captures a truth too often lost in our scramble for eco-credibility: Working with nature is sometimes the most radically green approach an architect can take.

A craftsman demonstrates how to char cedar (above): He lights newspaper at the base of three planks, coaxes the fre up the boards, then douses them with water after seven minutes. The painstaking process is said to protect wood against rain, rot, and insects for 80 years. It also gives the exteriors a reptilian texture that’s striking and practical.

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project X-Small, 15-19 Clifton Street architects Beat Schenk and Chaewon Kim location Cambridge, Massachusetts published March 2007

Stacked Wood text by Hillary Geronemus photos by Adam Friedberg

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FACADE FOCUS

X-Small is the fnal piece of Beat Schenk and Chaewon Kim’s domestic design puzzle, situated on their lot near Harvard University, where Kim attended graduate school. Windows are strategically placed at the corners of the marine plywood facade to maximize light and privacy.

A Jenga-like plywood tower with a petite footprint completes a residential compound designed and built by two Cambridge architects.

Meet the two hardest-working architects in America: Beat Schenk and Chaewon Kim. The pair met in the 1990s as students at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles, where both spent their free time browsing building supplies at the local Home Depot. While waiting to get licensed in the United States—Schenk is Swiss; Kim, Korean—the pair drew on their DIY beginnings to build not one, but four homes on their Cambridge property. With cash at a minimum, the duo scoured for cheap materials online and spent nights and weekends doing most of the construction work themselves. The last structure, X-Small, comprises three pivoting 16-by-22-foot marine plywood boxes. Organized as tidily as a ship, the economical abode is centered around a rough-grained oak-plywood stairwell. 39

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PROP STYLING BY LAUREN SHIELDS

Metal

Whether polished to a spectacular luster or left to weather with the elements, used as hefty structural support or applied as a refined accent, metal has the ability to instill a gleaming combination of rigor and personality to a house. DWELL

Photo by Victor Prado

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text by Diana Budds The Rolling Huts designed by Olson Kundig Architects in Mazama, Washington, sit lightly on the land thanks to wheels that allow the tiny residences to “hover” above the site, optimizing views of the landscape (below).

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Tom Kundig Growing up in eastern Washington, Seattle-based architect Tom Kundig came to know steel by watching a family friend create large sculptures. “I understood from a very young age what steel’s potential could be,” he says. “You can make things very light, very heavy, tough, delicate.” Kundig’s designs include everything from largescale custom metal doors and subtle glints from risers on a staircase to his own line of hardware from 12th Avenue Iron.

MATERIAL SOURCEBOOK

What about steel intrigues you most? It’s amazing what you can do with it. It’s a tough, malleable, morphable material. Almost anything you can imagine, you can fabricate out of steel. It allows you to explore and to experiment. I think that’s one reason sculptors use steel a lot.

PHOTO BY DEREK PIROZZI (ROLLING HUTS), BENJAMIN BENSCHNEIDER (ART STABLE), NIC LEHOUX (HAMMER HOUSE)

How do people typically respond to steel? Why do you like to work with it? It has somewhat of a structural bad rap because it’s considered to be cold and

dwell.com/tom-kundig g Spy more projects from the metals mastermind.

industrial and somewhat aggressive as a material. Used properly, it can be quite beautiful, whether it’s very fne and tailored or whether it’s more rough and industrial. The most satisfying part of the material is the reaction people will have when they fnally see steel in a surprising form.

Q & A

What are steel’s biggest limitations and potential? It’s relatively heavy. If you make an object and you’re not careful, it can be fairly heavy. Obviously it’s a dense material, and with that comes some heaviness. It’s just the nature of it. Some steel weathers, which I actually think is beautiful, although some people would say it’s a limitation. If there’s any “mastery” of the material, it’s that I recognized its limitations and its potential.

The Hammer House in Seattle (below) is clad in weathered steel panels, which provide privacy from the busy street. Natural light enters from a glass-walled bay directly behind the opaque wall.

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What craftspeople, designers, or architects who are known for using steel have inspired your work? The work of architect Carlos Scarpa and the unnamed craftspeople with whom he worked in Italy in the 1950s and ’60s. I’ve been completely and obviously inspired by the Maison de Verre by Pierre Chareau [and Bernard Bijvoet]. And as a kid—because my parents were Swiss we went to Switzerland a lot—I was exposed to Jean Tinguely, who was a sculptor of metal, gizmo-like sculptures that are fantastic devices.

Built on the site of a former horse stable, Art Stable (left) is a mixed-use infll project in Seattle, Washington, that boasts an 80-foot-tall hinge for hand-cranked doors.

What type of steel do you like to work with most? Mild steel is probably my go-to because it’s easily shaped and readily available. It comes in all shapes, sizes, and thicknesses, and has been manufactured in a way that it can most easily be formed or ftted or shaped. Also, it’s the steel that weathers the easiest. For people looking to incorporate steel into their architectural projects, how can its visual and physical properties best be applied? There are a number of steels. There’s carbon steel, mild steel, stainless steel; there are all sorts of alloys for diferent situations. The best way to harness the potential in all these steels is to understand your project’s intent and the converging issues of ease of fabrication, budget, strength, stifness, and weathering capability. Then try to pick the best steel alloy or steel material that fts the project.

“Virtually all of my projects have some sort of steel involved, and hopefully, if I’m doing my job, I’m using it appropriately.” DWELL

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The black metal facade of Motoshi Yatabe’s residence (right) may turn a darkly futuristic face to its block, but behind it the house is full of light. In Saitama, a tightly packed neighborhood near Tokyo, the screen afords the family privacy without sacrifcing outdoor space. Although the house is modern, local stonemasonry across the street reminds the residents of the neighborhood’s traditional character (opposite).

Tightly Knit Drawing on an inherited plot of land, his father’s steel company, and his brotherin-law’s architectural know-how, Motoshi Yatabe’s house is all in the family.

text by Mimi Zeiger photos by Dean Kaufman

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project Y House architect IDEA Ofce location Saitama Prefecture, Japan published December/January 2010

MATERIAL SOURCEBOOK

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Motoshi Yatabe grew up on a quiet, almost rural street in Japan’s Saitama Prefecture. There was a vegetable garden in front of his childhood home and a rice feld across the street—plenty of room for him and his sister, Masako, to play. Sited roughly 15 miles outside central Tokyo, it had yet to be colonized as part of the Greater Tokyo Area. Today, each block is lined by single-family homes packed shoulder to shoulder like commuters on a Tokyo subway. To say that Tokyo is dense is to trade in old aphorisms: salarymen in capsule hotels, bento box–size houses, minivans that are truly mini, and sidewalks that pulsate with throngs of people. The spaces that result from these conditions (the best of which marry pricey real estate with high design) are fetishized, especially in the West. But suburbs like Saitama, which was established as its own city in 2001, have grown over the past 30 years to tell a diferent story. What began as loose sprawl has grown denser and denser. Yatabe, along with his parents and sister, moved out of their old house before development boomed, but the family held on to the increasingly valuable property. As the neighborhood matured, so did Yatabe. He’s now married to Yukiyo, has two young sons, Taiga and Kouga, and works for the family business, Yatabe Steel Fabrication. The company was founded by his grandfather after World War II and was handed down to his father; Yatabe is next in line.

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Slotted between the street-side enclosure and the living area is a breezy second-foor terrace (below). Brise-soleil slats shade the interior. Yatabe’s steel fabrication company created the robust, truss-like armature that extends from the house to support the deck and facade.

By pushing the facade toward the street, the architects liberated the design from these restrictions. Hidden behind the black enclosure is a glass facade that looks onto an ample outdoor space open to the sky: a shady garden on the lower foor and a sheltered terrace just of the living room on the second foor. (A steel brise-soleil keeps the south-facing glazing cool.) Painted white, with a perforated screen to shield the garden from the adjacent property, the space is luminous. Each room in the house enjoys views of the garden and terrace, where the quality of light changes throughout the day. A single maple tree and pots of bamboo add touches of green. The house’s steel structure, including the robust frame that extends from the house to support the metal facade, was fabricated by Yatabe’s company. He personally oversaw every beam and bolt. “To be honest, it was very hard to work on. The workers at our factory found it very challenging to realize the design, but in the end they were proud of the result,” he says. Even Taiga and Kouga get into the family business: They climb the exposed part of the steel structure as if it were a jungle gym. Despite its severe face, the house is not a fortress. Fulflling Yatabe’s desires, it is bright, open, and welcoming. The architects took a delicate approach to the folded-metal facade. A careful incision reveals the front door, while the southern sun reaches the interior via a large rectangular opening cut into the house’s

“I have wonderful memories about the old house where we grew up. I wanted that same feeling in our new house.”—Motoshi Yatabe, resident

On the terrace, vibrant orange planters rest atop a steel ledge (right). The narrow vertical gap ofers a glimpse of the world beyond the house’s envelope. Viewed from the street, the cut “amplifes your curiosity by what is revealed and what remains concealed,” architect Russell N. Thomsen says.

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In 2005, he began talking to Masako’s husband, architect Russell N. Thomsen of Los Angeles–based frm IDEA Ofce, about building a new home on the Saitama lot. (The old house had been razed years earlier.) “I have wonderful memories about the old house where we grew up,” Yatabe recalls. “I wanted that same feeling in our new house. I wanted it to be a place where our families could get together, where friends would enjoy visiting.” Thomsen began working on the design in 2006, when he was teaching at SCI-Arc’s study-abroad program at Kyoto Seika University for a semester. Back in the States, Thomsen and his partner Eric A. Kahn, worked with Ron Golan to translate Yatabe’s desires into a straightforward program: a master bedroom, bedrooms for the boys, a hobby-ofce space, and a lofty main room to accommodate living, dining, and cooking. At 1,000 square feet, the house efciently answers the family’s needs. However, with a black metal facade on the street, it doesn’t immediately resemble the kind of inviting abode Yatabe envisioned. The tight, south-facing site complicated matters, leading the architects to screen for both sun exposure and privacy. Local typologies ofered few clues. In response to growing density, zoning regulations control the height and setback from the street, so homes in the neighborhood all follow a similar pattern—boxy profles that feature shallow balconies and meager gardens.

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The family’s hub is a highceilinged main room on the second level (above). It’s casual and gets plenty of morning light. Called the “LDK,” for living, dining, and kitchen, the space blends a Western loft-like feel with a traditional

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Japanese layout, where rooms are multipurpose. White prefabricated cabinets and countertops make for a streamlined kitchen (opposite). On the third foor, a pint-size workstation (below) for the boys overlooks the garden.

taut skin. Here, the terrace spot connects with the city. “Our younger son, Kouga, likes the terrace because he can see the sunset from there,” Yatabe says. “We are surprised that so many of our son’s friends like to come and play at the house—almost every day. They really like to come to this house, and maybe not so much because of our son,” he teases. Although the distinctive structure sticks out on the block, it does take some inspiration from vernacular Japanese architecture. Outdoor living is part and parcel of Los Angeles architecture, and the European and California modernists do inform IDEA Ofce’s work. But Thomsen was also infuenced by machiya, townhouses typical of the Kyoto area, which feature small courtyard gardens that similarly relate inside and outside. As much as Thomsen draws on tradition, in Japan he’s a Western architect. And he’s okay with that. “I’ll always be a foreigner, but ideas from the West have always been incorporated, tweaked, and made Japanese,” he notes. Indeed, one space that makes the house so comfortable is what’s locally referred to as the “LDK,” for living, dining, and kitchen. It blends Eastern and Western sensibilities, and with no walls separating the diferent areas and a 12-foot-high ceiling, it’s a spot for the family to gather and entertain. It resembles a loft, but it’s also like traditional Japanese houses where shoji screens make it possible for rooms to be fexible, 49

“Everyone stops to look at the building,” says Yatabe. Cement panels painted white clad the facade’s back side (above). The blue panels mark the separation between the carport and garden, and establish the walkway to the front door. While the facade is severe (opposite) the interiors

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ofer a luminous contrast (below). The house is “a little like a black obsidian stone that is cracked open to reveal the white interiors and green garden inside,” Thomsen says. Brothers Taiga and Kouga stage a Star Wars–style duel on the open-tread stair leading from the garage to the living room.

not dedicated to a single purpose. A prefab kitchen and custom-made storage cabinets line its perimeter, but otherwise the room is simply defned by what you put in it—couches or tatami mats. “It’s a space that cuts across cultures,” explains Thomsen. “It represents an informality that is more prevalent in Japan these days.” Cultural exchange was a literal part of the design and construction process. IDEA Ofce collaborated with Tokyo-based architect Masao Yahagi. Once the scheme was set in Los Angeles, a fnal model was shipped overseas. Yahagi developed the construction documents, engineering and drawing the house to meet local standards, and set up a construction blog, so IDEA Ofce was able to see daily posts. During the process, Thomsen returned to Japan several times to work on details. There’s potential for the exchange to go both ways. Back in Los Angeles, Thomsen considers how the house could infuence his hometown. “Good architecture is not necessarily big architecture,” he says. “Smaller buildings, such as this house, can challenge the creativity of an architect in unexpected ways. It takes a shift in cultural understanding about how to do more with less.” In California, it’s unsustainable to keep building subdivisions. The Japanese embrace of density is not dark and dystopic as imagined in science fction, but light-flled and efcient. Most importantly, it still feels like home. MATERIAL SOURCEBOOK

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Scrap House “Repurpose, refurbish, recycle” was the guiding principle for a metals broker in Ontario who harnessed his passion for— and knowledge of—industrial materials to create a new house from old scrap.

story by Alex Bozikovic photos by Lorne Bridgman

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project Sherbanuk Residence designer James Campbell location Ontario, Canada published December/January 2009

The front of the house, made from repurposed materials, looks like a cluster of “sheds”: a guest and living space to the right, a garage and workshop to the left, and the main living area to the back (above).

In Town of The Blue Mountains, Ontario, 90 minutes northwest of Toronto, sits a country house with an industrial heart, built with used I-beams, polished concrete, galvanized steel, and recycled hardwood. This is not your average house in Blue Mountains, but it’s the dream home of metals broker S. J. Sherbanuk. “I’ve always had this fascination with industrial buildings, and with my work, I’ve been in a lot of steel mills,” Sherbanuk says. “Plus, I’m a modernist, so the way to combine those things is to build an environment with stuf I’m familiar with.” Sherbanuk’s approach to sustainability is as utilitarian as his design sense, leaning less on the recent arrival of efciency technologies and more on the long history of material reuse and the unfailing reliability of industrial scrap to last for centuries. Outside, old galvanized-steel siding provides the skin for the house. Inside, in the living-dining area, a series of exposed steel girders support the broad roof. Two of the girders, rescued from a MATERIAL SOURCEBOOK

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Rootedness and roughness is inherent to the designer, James Campbell, who was determined to develop an architecture that refects the area’s traditional building forms: “The barns and springhouses, they’re the local vernacular, and that’s a real inspiration for our work in this house.” Campbell—who designed the house with his associate and wife, Suzanne Wesetvik—also employed basic sustainable building strategies. The house’s main exposure is to the southeast for optimal levels of sunlight; in winter the concrete foor gains heat during the day and releases it at night, supplemented by radiant-foor heating systems. Small windows along the west side let prevailing winds in for natural ventilation. Despite those features, Sherbanuk fgures the house’s greenest quality will come out in the long term. “With most houses, when they’re torn down, everything goes into a bin,” Sherbanuk says. “When this house gets pulled down 60 or 80 years from now, they won’t even need a bin. It’s all gonna get reused.”

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demolition job, bear marks from their previous lives in another building. The attention to recycled materials comes naturally to Sherbanuk. He used to co-own a large scrap yard, and he’s seen many tons of steel, copper, and aluminum go from fnished product back to raw material. “All metals are infnitely recyclable,” he says. There’s also a more personal resonance to the house: It reminds Sherbanuk of his childhood in a mining town on the north shore of Lake Huron. “I hung out in the shed because our house was really small,” he recalls. “I had three brothers, so that was the only place I could get away.” Completed in 2007, Sherbanuk’s home is a series of irregularly shaped “sheds”: a long, low volume housing the guest suite and living-dining area; another with a workshop, laundry, and mudroom; and a three-story, metal-clad tower for the kitchen, bedroom, and workout room. It’s an odd shape, yet it fts the landscape, hugging the hillside and nestling into the shade of the forest at its peak.

S. J. Sherbanuk and James Campbell sit by the outdoor freplace (bottom left). Rusting steel is an important part of the house’s patina (below), Campbell says. “We appreciate

materials in the raw,” he notes. “The tables aren’t stained; the steel isn’t painted. The materials are what they are.” Chairs by Tolix are stationed in the enclosed porch (above).

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text by Chris Rubin photos by Gregg Segal

project Xeros architect Blank Studio location Phoenix, Arizona published September 2006

If an attorney who represents himself has a fool for a client, as the expression goes, what of an architect? Matthew Trzebiatowski didn’t know the answer, but he was aware of some of the potential pitfalls and benefts when he opted to pursue this path, working in partnership with his wife, Lisa, to construct their new home and ofce, which they named Xeros. The three-story steel, glass, concrete, and wire mesh structure abuts the North Mountain Preserve in the edgy Phoenix neighborhood of Sunnyslope. Matthew, a self-described corn-fed Midwest farm boy of 33, chose to head west to Phoenix to jump-start his career after studying architecture at the University of Wisconsin. “It’s still the open West,” Matthew says of Arizona. “If I had stayed home, I’d have spent half 54

To combat an extreme climate, Matthew Trzebiatowski took a sustainable approach and used steel, glass, and concrete.

my career just doing interiors—I would never have had the chance to do a house so early on.” Throwing himself fully into the project, Matthew had a surfeit of ideas. “The architect as his own client can be one of the greatest blessings,” Matthew says, “or one of the most complex problems. You have every idea that you want to get out, but no one to edit you. And it’s not only your home, but your calling card.” He managed to overcome the glut of ideas through the input of his wife, who worked as a clinical director at a mental-health hospital before joining her husband as managing partner of their frm, Blank Studio. “Some of the most brilliant editing,” he says, “was done by my wife.” Ultimately, the Trzebiatowskis came up with several goals they hoped to accomplish with their

The woven wire steel mesh cloaking Xeros’s east facade (above) stands in stark contrast to Phoenix’s blue sky. The glass-enclosed master bedroom foats above the corrugated, oxidized steel exterior (opposite).

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“Work with the existing infrastructure,” Matthew says. “Don’t keep going outward and gobbling up more real estate—go into the city, go into the texture that’s already there. If you can, go in and rehab an existing residence.” Indeed, the choice of neighborhood can have a greater impact than any other decision in the process, Matthew believes. “We feel the most important thing we did was to go into a place like Sunnyslope, that had not only economic depression but also some social questionability,” Matthew says. “It needed a second life. A residence like Xeros can turn that around. We can recycle a neighborhood as well as materials.” While that’s not always possible, homeowners and potential buyers can defnitely take home a few lessons from the Trzebiatowskis that will afect

The shower retains the spirit of Arizona heat with its shocking magenta ceilings, foors, and walls (below). The vanity is made from sanded and sealed oriented strand board, a waste material typically used in framing. Cold-rolled steel walls lend a bluish tint to the kitchen (opposite), which has cabinetry made of North American plywood (NAP).

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new house, not to mention principles to abide by. “The name ‘Xeros,’” Matthew says of the Greek word for dry, “is about being cognizant of where we’re building. Phoenix is a hot, dry place, and you try to remind yourself of that every time you make a decision.” But environmental concern didn’t completely drive the design. “Many more things could have been done, and should be done,” Matthew admits. “We’re not of the grid, and we could have used things like solar power and composting toilets. And we don’t have thoroughly insulated glass.” But by following a few basic principles of sustainability and urbanism, the Trzebiatowskis achieved some of their goals. And they believe much of what they did can be replicated by others through simple design decisions.

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“If you can use organic material, that’s always the most pleasant way, both psychologically and in reality.” —Matthew Trzebiatowski, architect

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Entrance Balcony Sitting Area Kitchen–Dining Room Master Bathroom Closet Sleeping-Media Area Residence Entrance Stair Reflecting Pool Studio Entrance Courtyard Studio Studio-Mezzanine Stairs to Studio Courtyard

Light refects of the dark NAP board foors and walls in the hallway, which leads to the bedroom (above). The lighter walls are thin-coat gypsum plaster with a beeswax coating. The steel mesh veil (opposite) casts soft light into the lowerlevel courtyard. Black stone and Mexican river stone come up against a three-eighth-inch minus pea gravel.

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not only their own residences but also the cities in which they reside—and perhaps even the planet at large. For instance, hot, sunny locations require substantial shade, and simple touches like wellplaced trees can provide that. “If you can use organic material,” Matthew says, “that’s always the most pleasant way, both psychologically and in reality.” Even in cooler climates, vegetation can help, but proper selection is essential. “Plant deciduous trees: In the summer, they’re in full foliage and give the shade you need; in winter, they drop those and you get the heat energy you need at that time.” Homes built on tight lots may not allow the addition of new trees, but other solutions are available. “You can add an exterior screen efect,” DWELL

Matthew ofers. “People do this in diferent ways, including something as basic as installing awnings.” The Trzebiatowskis know about this frsthand, as Xeros has a narrow footprint—just 12 feet wide for most of the structure. The building’s severe lines catch the eye, but it’s the rusting steel frame and exterior curtains of metal mesh that really demand attention. At Xeros, the mesh curtain is not simply an overhanging shade. “It’s truly a veil,” Matthew says. “There’s so much intensity of the outdoor amount of lumens and lights, but when you’re inside it completely evaporates, disappears. The amount of glazing we have in this space would be really overpowered if we didn’t have it.” If the live-work space sounds small, it feels wildly spacious to its occupants, who lived in the site’s 59

Le Corbusier’s LC2 chair is set alongside Pablo Pardo’s Elise lamp in the studio (left). A cinematic foor-to-ceiling glass wall in the bedroom ofers scenic views of the desert landscape (opposite). An LC4 chaise is one of the few furnishings in the space.

original 20-by-20-foot uninsulated shoe-box house for a year and a half before beginning construction. Blank Studio occupies the ground foor and a mezzanine, the latter of which is outftted with a shower and an espresso machine; a spiral staircase crafted from a single piece of steel connects those two levels. The compact residential section, reached by climbing an exposed steel staircase, sits above. Both Matthew and Lisa express delight with Xeros. “We call it sensual minimalism,” Matthew says of their home’s style. “We’re defnitely modernists and minimalists at heart when it comes to design.” While not everyone can build their own house, Matthew insists that anyone—architect or not—can apply the couple’s ideas in order to take the right step toward a sustainable future. For instance, it may seem 60

obvious, but mindful placement of windows can have a substantial impact on a home and its power needs. Matthew observes that many spec houses erected locally feature windows on all sides without regard to where sun hits the structure. He and Lisa opted to exclude major windows on the west side of their home, because that’s the side that takes the brunt of the sun every day. “Simple off-the-shelf design decisions like that can really afect energy needs,” Matthew says. The Trzebiatowskis will no doubt outgrow the compact Xeros house, so Matthew may then design and build a new home for himself and his family. If that means having a fool for a client once again, he will at the very least be a wiser fool—and one with new concepts ripe for experimentation. MATERIAL SOURCEBOOK

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story by Diana Budds photos by Andrew Rowat

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project J1931 architect Periphery Projects location New Haven, Connecticut published February 2013

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Architect Elijah Huge covered the backyard addition to a Connecticut house in metal shingles (opposite). “Good design doesn’t require the most expensive materials, but it does take time to explore ideas and fnd innovative solutions,” Huge says.

Adventurous but subtle. Something diferent that doesn’t scream for attention. These were the prompts John and Erika Jessen gave to architect Elijah Huge for the addition to their 1920s home in New Haven, Connecticut. With those in mind, Huge set out to fnd a cladding material that was both eye-catching and cost-efective. “They wanted the skin to be exciting,” he says. “I thought shingles would be a good choice because they would echo the texture of the existing house without trying to imitate it.” Even better, the stamped recycled aluminum shingles cost just two dollars per square foot—on par with run-of-the-mill vinyl siding, which “wasn’t an option,” says Huge.

Through online sleuthing, Huge discovered the shingles from Reinke Shakes, a Nebraska manufacturer that usually sells its product to builders of barns and geodesic domes. For a contemporary look that accentuates the visual continuity around the structure, he arranged them in a diagonal pattern rather than in a conventional series of stacks. Thanks to its refective surface, the extension receives soft and subtle light that gently illuminates the tree-shrouded yard and never casts a harsh glare. “It picks up the hues and intonations around it— yellow-orange in fall, gray in winter, green in summer,” says Erika. “It’s almost like a chameleon.”

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Abiquiu, New Mexico, owes this rugged metalclad house to a plucky pair of residents, two talented architects, and one long-sighted and very gracious loan officer.

Abiquiu Debut

Thanks to passive solar and radiant foors, Birgitte Ginge and Madeline Williamson’s house in Abiquiu, New Mexico, is comfortable year-round (right). For the snowy season, a Rais stove (below) provides extra warmth.

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as told to Chelsea Holden Baker photos by João Canziani

project Abiquiu House architect Anderson Anderson Architecture location Abiquiu, New Mexico published November 2008

Birgitte Ginge and Madeline Williamson imagined their golden years in a loft that mirrored their urbane sensibilities and professions in music and academia. So when they fell in love with a piece of land in the Rio Chama watershed of northern New Mexico, the couple sought an architect who could harmonize their interests with the environment. Ginge takes us through the union of landscape, architects, clients, and contractors. Birgitte Ginge: It was serendipity that we discovered the town of Abiquiu, New Mexico, after vacationing in Colorado. We were attracted because Georgia O’Keefe’s home is here, but when we arrived, the river in the desert landscape stunned us. It was love at frst sight. Nearly four years later we moved to New Mexico, thinking we’d have a house built in four to six months. It happened a little diferently. I grew up with Danish design in Copenhagen, and Madeline shares my commitment to modernism. While paging through books and magazines, we came across the 2003 design invitational with proposals for the first Dwell Home. We loved the ideas of the brothers Mark and Peter Anderson of Anderson Anderson Architecture. There was a lot we could DWELL

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relate to, especially because the house was designed for a musician: Madeline is an accomplished pianist, and I work for the Santa Fe Opera. So one day, we picked up the phone, called the Andersons, and said, “This is our situation: We don’t have a lot of money, we have a beautiful site, and we really love what you do. Would you be interested in working with us on the Abiquiu House?” We were surprised that it was a go. When we started collaborating with the Andersons, we talked a lot about our lifestyle. Their questions were not, “How many bedrooms? How many baths?” but, “How do you want the house to work for you on a daily basis? What are your priorities? What would make this a comfortable living space?” We weren’t building a house for resale; it was the house where we would spend the rest of our lives. Since music is such a huge part of our existence, the Andersons asked us for a discography. Our house was designed to a sound track of 14 hours of classical, Gypsy, and Latin music. Mark and Peter also asked for photographs and measurements of the furniture we wanted to have in the house. We were very committed to open space and a feeling of air and light everywhere, like a loft. There 66

are hardly any interior walls, unless they’re loadbearing or enclosing a toilet. In fact, we didn’t want doors either, but we have sliders for closing of the pet apartment and bathrooms. The focus was on washand-wear, low-maintenance materials, like concrete radiant foors and galvanized-steel cladding. It was very important to us to make this amazing site part of the house. The inside and the outside are blended, with lots of windows, porches, and easy access. It’s a 30-by-60-foot footprint and there was almost no excavation, no damage to the surrounding vegetation; it’s all natural landscaping. But the week of ground breaking, our contractor, who had experience with structural insulated panels like we were using, fled for bankruptcy. Finding another contractor was a problem because everyone here builds with adobe (which never has to be perfectly plumb), and nobody had ever seen a design like ours. What kept us going was that Mark and Peter were so supportive and encouraged us to act as owner-builders. Our bank was the opposite. They had approved our loan on the basis of using a general contractor. When the contractor went, our fnancing went too. So I brought the plans to a local bank and showed a loan ofcer there. The design excited her. She said,

Ginge descends one of two locally fabricated steel cylinders that create her “stairway to the stars” (above left). In the sitting room (above right), Eames shell chairs and a bank of luminous operable windows await a pair of weary readers. Ginge’s penchant for the bright red Varenna cabinets in the kitchen is matched only by her love of animals; rescue pets are de rigueur around the house (opposite).

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“I think you can do it, and I’m going to give you the money to do it, acting as your own contractor.” Realizing a third party believed in us was a pivotal moment. We started bidding for subcontractors and ended up coordinating and managing work among 28 diferent people. When the walls went up, I took Mark and Peter to the second foor, where there’s a window meant to provide light to the main room. At the top of the stairs you see this 300-year-old adobe church through it, framed like a photograph. I said, “This is just amazing. How did you know this would happen?” Mark looked at me and said, “I guess I just got lucky.” And that is one of the positive aspects of building a house—the things you didn’t anticipate that, in most cases, are happy surprises. When we frst climbed a ladder to the roof, the magic of stepping up from ground level to see the spectacular views, knowing that this would be ours for the rest of our lives, and realizing that Mark and Peter were able to imagine this three-dimensionally, while just standing on the empty ground—that was astounding. Our desire to live in Abiquiu was the driving factor, but we really needed empowerment from other people: a friend who told us about the property, the kind loan ofcer, local craftsmen, and, of course, Mark and Peter.

“The focus was on wash-and-wear, lowmaintenance materials like concrete radiant floors and galvanized-steel cladding.”—Birgitte Ginge, resident

Steel and concrete prices skyrocketed during construction, yet Williamson and Ginge couldn’t imagine building with any other materials (top). A perforated metal screen serves

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as a shower curtain in the bathroom (left). The rooftop (above) is wired for a solar farm. Williamson’s Schimmel grand piano (opposite) is the house’s centerpiece.

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Cherner

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classics sustainably made in the U.S.A.

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text by Jane Szita photo by Mercel van Beu ukering project Villa DVT architect BoetzkesHelder location Arnhem, the Nettherlands published May 2012

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Screening g for Attention A tactile aluminum skin enlivens the facade of a house in the Netherlands.

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While still studying architecture at Eindhoven University of Technology, Servie Boetzkes and Jeroen Helder landed a commission through friends of friends to build a home in Arnhem. “The clients asked for a ‘diferentlooking’ home,” says Helder. “They also asked for a loft-style interior.” To fulfll the frst requirement, the architects opted for a perforated and expanded aluminum facade. Enticingly tactile, it attracts attention, while screening much of the interior from view. A ten-centimeter gap between the aluminum and an underlying waterproof foil layer ventilates hot air away from the house. “A facade like this hadn’t been done in the Netherlands before,” Helder says of the project.

In addition to a raised surface, the facade of the Dutch house is rendered even more unique thanks to special metallic powder coating on the aluminum that shifts from gray to blue, according to changing light conditions from the sun (inset).

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Glass

Glass stands apart among the building blocks of architecture: It’s not a workhorse like wood or masonry, but when it is used creatively, small spaces appear larger and barriers seem to disappear. Ethereal and transparent, glass is as essential as a sturdy foundation. DWELL

Photo by Victor Prado

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text by William Lamb Built as a weekend retreat for a New York City couple, the Salt Point House (below and opposite left) was conceived as an open-ended box with a glass wall at either end. Along the sides, screens of perforated and corrugated stainless steel curate views of the landscape while broadcasting subtle refections of the surrounding meadows and trees.

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Thomas Phifer Thomas Phifer, who spent a decade as a partner in Richard Meier’s ofce before founding his own architectural frm in 1997, designs buildings that use glass—sometimes amply, always creatively— to ground them frmly in their landscapes. At one end of the spectrum is a glass pavilion on Fishers Island, New York, that Phifer designed for a former director of the Whitney Museum and his wife. At the other are two structures—one in Madison, Wisconsin, the other in Salt Point, New York—that use glass sparingly to frame specifc views. We sat down with Phifer in his Manhattan ofce to ask him about how he approaches glass.

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What roles do windows and glass play in your projects? Why is this design element so critical? I think for too long buildings have not been open to the landscape. They’ve been fortresses; they’ve been shut of. What we try to do is connect people to nature, and with every project there’s an attitude about making a sincere and direct connection to the landscape. Either the building can be completely open to the landscape—and there’s a certain narrative there that’s developed between the gardens and the threshold of architecture—or, as we’ve done in many projects, there can be more of a framed relationship.

PHOTOS BY SCOTT FRANCES. MADISON HOUSE RENDERING BY ENCORE

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dwell.com/thomas-phifer p Head online for a closer look at Phifer’s work, and to read a previous interview with him.

When you’re working with glass, how do you ensure that the interiors are neither too hot nor too drafty? All of these projects, especially the Fishers Island House, are shaded, which gets the radiant heat of the house. We also use geothermal foors to heat and cool the house, so all the energy comes from the earth, and they actually have a very low amount of energy that they consume because all of the systems work together. The slightly refective glass we’re using on the Madison House has a more efcient shading coefcient, greatly improving the environmental performance. It really helps in terms of keeping the temperature of the house inside constant.

Q& A

Elsewhere, then, you have been able to establish a similar connection to the landscape by using glass in a more measured way? That’s exactly right. And those houses attempt to frame the land, to frame the landscape, to heighten the experience of being in the house. In the Salt Point House, we framed a horizontal

What materials best complement glass? I think that depends on the particular project. [In the Madison House], it’s a very delicate balance between the older brick and these contemporary pieces of glass, and it kind of gets back to nature and the directness of a material. Most people see glass, but it’s always captured in a frame. Nobody knows how thick it is; nobody knows about the diferent layering. It’s a mysterious product. Here, we bring a slight bit of refectivity so you understand that glass can be a surface.

A glass pavilion on Fishers Island, New York, that Phifer designed for a former director of the Whitney Museum captures views of the surrounding gardens and Long Island Sound (below). Phifer’s admiration for Thomas Jeferson’s garden walls on the University of Virginia campus inspired his design for a house in Madison, Wisconsin, that features refective windows embedded in a serpentine facade of salvaged brick (bottom).

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How do you decide which approach to take—whether to construct a glass pavilion like the Fishers Island House, for example, or to use windows to frame particular views? I think a lot of that has to do with the people we work with. Certainly, it was a very particular situation at the Fishers Island House. This was a garden that had been there for 15 years that had been nurtured, and my client wanted a special relationship with his garden, so we made a house that related in very particular, very specifc ways to the garden. Usually projects work from the inside out, but this worked from the outside in, where the garden had a relationship to the architecture.

perspective that heightened the experience of the horizontal nature of the site. For the house in Madison, we have these windows that are quite large—eight feet square—and they refect the garden and make it a part of the spirit of the house.

“Glass wants to have an authentic voice, like any other material, so you understand what it is, how large it is, and what it’s like to be behind it and in front of it.” 75

Edgeland House, built on a clif-top lot in Austin by architect Thomas Bercy for lawyer and writer Chris Brown, is crowned with a living roof to help it blend into the landscape. The concrete, steel, and glass house is divided into two distinct public and private halves. The land is adjacent to the Colorado River, along which Brown and his girlfriend, Agustina Rodriguez (opposite), walk their dogs.

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On Austin’s outskirts, where urban, industrial, and rural styles collide, lawyer and science-fiction author Chris Brown’s bunker-style home redefines modern city living.

text by Mitchell Alan Parker photos by Dave Mead project Edgeland House architect Bercy Chen Studio location Austin, Texas published April 2013

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When Chris Brown needs to think, he grabs his canoe. For the past decade, Brown, a lawyer by day, science-fction writer by night, has found peace paddling down a stretch of the Colorado River that snakes through Austin. The Zen-like efect comes not only from the swooping egrets, ospreys, and herons that patrol the waterway but also from the geographic history of the area—an industrial-meets-urban edgeland once home to the city dump, the cattle-driving Chisholm Trail, and a B-52 bomber base. “I found it to be a pretty transcendent experience that changed the way I think about the environment in which I live,” Brown says. One afternoon, while searching for more access points to the river, Brown discovered a path that led

down to hundreds of clif swallows and their mud nests under a highway bridge that spanned the water. He became hooked on the idea of building a house that interpreted the intersection of animal habitat and industrial wasteland. “Something about that idea of wild nature adapted to the structure moved me,” he says. So, in 2009, newly divorced and living in a downtown Austin apartment, Brown bought an empty lot on a bluf adjacent to the Colorado. If he wanted a piece of gritty history, he now had it. Unfortunately, it came with heaps of concrete, rebar, and debris that had been dumped by construction crews and a decommissioned oil pipeline from the 1920s wending through the ground beneath the property. 77

“We move between rooms and treat the natural environment around us as a very big part of our home—as our living room.” —Chris Brown, resident

“It’s the type of project only a lawyer would do,” Brown says of the mind-draining task of working with a global oil company and the city of Austin’s permitting arm to remove the pipeline, lift the easement, retain liability, and do testing to confrm that the ground was clean. But there was a silver lining. Because digging up the pipeline created a massive hole, architect Thomas Bercy of the Austin-based frm Bercy Chen Studio, whom Brown had met through a friend, proposed partially burying the house. He envisioned a modern design that nodded to the construction of ancient pit houses—mud-and-grass huts half-buried in the earth by the Plains Indians who once inhabited the area. “We had a hunch that, because of his sci-f writing and background, Chris would want something more forward-looking,” says Bercy. Bercy updated the idea with a concrete foundation, a structural steel frame, and glass walls that look toward a rift that divides the house into two parts. One side contains the kitchen, dining, and living room spaces, while the other side contains two bedrooms and a writer’s loft. Brown shares the space with his girlfriend, Agustina Rodriguez, an architect and designer, and his 18-year-old son, Hugo Nakashima-Brown. Furnishings in the space are of two categories: “Stuf we had before we moved here and white cabinetry from Ikea,” Brown says. He didn’t want any wood in 78

Rodriguez, a designer and architect who runs the studio Agi Miagi, created the pendant lamp and terrariums in the dining area (above left). The space is open to the living area, where Brown’s son, Hugo, sits on a Living Divani sofa. The countertop-table is by Bercy Chen Studio. Ryan Anderson of RAD Furniture designed the stools as well as the furniture on the pool deck (above).

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the house, as a matter of personal preference, but some did make its way inside in the form of modern backless stools by local furniture builder Ryan Anderson. The stools provide seating for a large, custom, bent-steel counter surface in the kitchen. There are also little treasures throughout the house—“Easter eggs,” Brown calls them—found on the property or during walks in the woods out back: Heart-shaped rocks, brightly colored feathers, a bird skeleton, turn-of-the-century glass medicine bottles, and pieces of teacups can be found in the bathroom, in clay pots, or in terrariums that Rodriguez made. Not that anyone passing by would notice any of this. Few people even realize there’s a house there DWELL

at all: Tucked beneath a grassy roof covered by nearly 200 species of plants and grasses, the structure is virtually invisible from the nearby street. In fact, the 1,400-square-foot house is so well hidden in the earth that it doesn’t seem to register on the radar of local wildlife either. Birds, butterfies, bees, dragonfies, hawks, snakes, lizards, and frogs all treat the house like just another grassy knoll. This nature show is visible from nearly every room in the house through the glass-and-steel walls that look toward the rift. “We move between rooms and treat the natural environment around us as a very big part of our home—as our living room,” Brown says. “The sensation when you sit in here and look up is like Avatar—everything buzzing and fying.” 79

Brown and his dog Katsu head to the river; the path was once a dumping ground atop a long-defunct underground oil pipeline. The land required a complicated excavation, ofering an opportunity for Bercy to partially bury the house. The green roof was designed by John Hart Asher of the Ecosystem Design Group at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildfower Center in Austin.

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Native grasses spill forth from the green roof toward a stairway leading to the main level (above). The foor plan (above left) refects the way in which the design’s angles interact with the site. A Jens Risom side chair centers the living room (below), which looks across the courtyard to the bedroom pavilion.

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But covering the highly geometric roof with all that greenery was a big challenge for Bercy, who had to incorporate anti-erosion mats in the design in order to hold the soil in place and support the hundreds of plants, which are watered by a drip irrigation system. “It was a way of healing the site’s industrial past,” says Bercy. “The green roof became about restoring the prairie, which created this whole ecosystem. So now the house is alive.” The forward-thinking approach paid of in efciency, too: Nine inches of soil work wonders on reducing energy bills, especially when coupled with a radiant cooling and heating system and an energy-exchange method that makes the house “60 to 70 percent more efcient than other houses in Austin, Texas, and even the USA,” according to Bercy. And, as a constant reminder of where everything began, those clif swallows from the nearby bridge arrive at dusk and dawn every day, fying in remarkable “bombing patterns, eating all the fying bugs,” Brown says. The whole experience has been eye-opening; he’s come to realize that “you don’t have to go to a park to be in nature; it’s right here in the middle of the city, under the freeway, seen from your living room—if you can learn to perceive it.”

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An Australian architect covers a glass facade with a decal mimicking the tree line from a nearby park, providing shade, privacy, and energy savings.

Ace in the Home One of Australia’s most exciting young architects, Andrew Maynard, conceived a forestthemed decal for an addition to a house outside Melbourne as an aesthetic touch with a practical edge (above). The image for the decal came from a photograph taken at a local

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park, a touch that grounds the decorative element, and the house, in its environment. The second story of the addition cantilevers over the ground foor and a kitchen that opens to the elements when a pair of bifold doors are opened (opposite above).

The best kind of privacy comes from being nestled behind leafy trees, where sunlight flters through to cast long, arboreal shadows. But not everyone is lucky enough to have a building site endowed with wellestablished trees. Fencing and blinds—or simply fewer windows—are the most obvious ways to block the eyes of strangers; but more creative solutions let the sun shine in without allowing too much visibility to the world at large. Architect Andrew Maynard developed an unusual graphic strategy to bring the feeling of a wooded hideout to an exposed urban addition. His Tattoo House, an extension to an existing three-bedroom home in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy, is emblazoned with a giant decal. This brought the house into compliance with a city requirement that all homes have 75 percent opacity on the second foor, eliminated the need for screening, helped to save on the tight construction budget, and it has kept energy costs down by refecting glare. MATERIAL SOURCEBOOK

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text by Sarah Rich photos by Peter Bennetts

project Tattoo House architect Andrew Maynard Architects location Fitzroy, Australia published March 2009

Though the “tattoo” makes the project appear elaborate, it’s actually quite simple. The homeowners requested a light-flled living space and kitchen to accommodate their growing family, a challenge that Maynard solved with a basic box. The lower level is little more than a glass-enclosed deck, with bifold doors on two sides that slide away to open the kitchen. Once they are open, the upper level appears to cantilever over the yard, gently masked by the fat “trees” that adorn the windows. Best of all, because the decals were based on photos taken at a local park, the silhouettes of the branches and leaves match those of the neighbors’ trees over the fence. As the shadows and patterns shift and change throughout the day, one could almost overlook the fact that the home’s pleasant shade doesn’t come from an actual canopy of greenery but rather from a well-executed architectural trick of graphic design. DWELL

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text by Kelsey Keith photos by Mark Mahaney

A self-taught designer embarks upon a solo mission to revive a 19th-century homestead.

In 2002, when Tom Givone bought a toppling 200-year-old farmhouse peeling with outdated neon blue paint, his new neighbors in upstate New York advised chucking it straight into a pit in the house’s equally rundown backyard. Instead, the experience helped defne the homeowner-turned-contractor’s love of the picturesque and channel it into a newfound talent for renovation. A former advertising copywriter, Givone cheekily gives credit for his roundabout career to the “quintessentially awful” landlord who ejected him from a rent-stabilized studio in the late ’90s, spurring his frst home purchase. His self-described “strange and delightful” path to architectural design thus began on a narrow cobblestone lane in the upper reaches of Manhattan in a dilapidated row house, built in 1882 among a double row of identical clapboard abodes. From there, Givone edged ever northward, to the western edge of the Catskill Mountains, where he frst spotted the locally infamous blue farmhouse, then three others that he also eventually rehabbed back to health. His current weekend abode, nicknamed the Floating Farmhouse, is—so far—his capstone project, a synthesis of personal taste, material experimentation, and historically sensitive restoration. It is a living laboratory for how to bring the vernacular past into the present.

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Hope Floats

project Floating Farmhouse designer Givone Home location Eldred, New York published May 2012

This labor in homemaking has been methodical, if not by choice then by fnancial necessity, owing to the economic depression of 2008. Instead of suspending all activity on the creek-adjacent farmhouse, Givone focused on perfecting his materials. For the lattice of oxidized tube steel that frames the back wall of the rear addition, three years of exposure to weather (aided by a daily acid bath) yielded a leather-like patina, repeated in the central freplace stack, which is fnished in matching weathered Cor-Ten steel. During that time, he also enlisted local laborers for help with the interior demolition, which Givone likens to “an archeological dig: messy but rewarding.” They removed two bays in the back of the house and erected a new wing, similar in proportion to the original gabled structure but fnished with a transparent portal of 22-foot-tall skyscraper glass, the ne plus ultra of the picture window. The addition shelters the new kitchen—characterized by the steel-clad, cast-concrete wood-burning oven and two massive salvaged ceiling beams—and a 12-by-50-foot covered side porch cantilevered over a meandering stream. The mélange of old and new is the backbone of Givone’s design philosophy: “I peel back layers, expose what is inherent to the structure, and incorporate it into the fnal design; add by taking

away.” Once uncovered, the farmhouse’s original cedar shake roof shingles and rough wall planks factored in as a visible design element in what are now the master bedroom and the guest bedroom hallway. Eleven pine trees on the property, each over 150 feet tall and encroaching on the existing house, were cut and milled onsite, providing the raw material for most of its new custom woodwork, including wainscoting, the beaded boarding on the porch ceiling, door and window trim, and cofers in the frst-foor living room. Bluestone, which wraps around the kitchen counters until it meets the foor, was quarried and manufactured locally. Salvage features strongly in the decor as well. A deceased uncle’s collection of vintage and industrial furniture makes an appearance as a therapist’s leather chaise longue, a baroque mirror in the otherwiseaustere master bedroom, and a 19th-century woodand-zinc soaking tub rescued from a New York City tenement building. Givone wrapped the latter artifact with shiny stainless steel; the metallic sheen contrasts the guest bathroom’s plain white walls (sealed with Thoroseal plaster to prevent water migration and mitigate the need for ceramic tile). Hand-hewn beams scouted from a centuries-old barn in neighboring Pennsylvania add texture to the kitchen and master

Tom Givone sits at a table of his own design (above left), which he had fabricated from reclaimed wood by a local carpenter. The table is situated in front of the house’s rear wall of skyscraper glass. Laminate kitchen cabinets by Ikea are framed in wraparound bluestone; the 48-inch commercial range is by FiveStar (above right). Givone considers his pizza-cooking technique in front of the custom-built wood-fred oven (opposite).

“The Floating Farmhouse is the culmination of a decade-long experiment in how opposites attract.” —Tom Givone, resident and designer 88

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“The hope has been to combine archaic and modern elements in a way that would enhance the beauty of each by virtue of its contrast with the other.”—Tom Givone, resident and designer

Floating Farmhouse Floor Plans A B C D E F G H I J

Guest Bedroom Master Bathroom Master Bedroom Guest Bathroom Entrance Utility Room Bathroom Living Area Kitchen-Dining Area Cantilevered Porch

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Second Floor

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First Floor A salvaged 19th-century soaking tub wrapped in stainless steel (left) is topped by a Hudson Reed faucet. A gas freplace fronted in weathered steel warms the lofty master bedroom, whose spare decor is framed with beams discovered in a Pennsylvania barn (above). The beams also were used in the kitchen. The Tizio desk lamp is by Artemide.

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Coined in the 1930s, the term “heat sink” describes a device that absorbs or dissipates heat. In the case of the cast-iron radiators in Givone’s bedroom (opposite top), “heat sink” refers to their ability to retain and continually release heat long after water has passed through the pipes. “The boiler doesn’t have to fre as frequently to maintain a room’s temperature,” Givone says, “and, for that reason, converted antique radiators are more efcient than standard hotwater baseboards.”

“I wanted to create tension between polished and raw, primitive and industrial.”—Tom Givone

bedroom, both intentionally spare though cozy, thanks in part to the antique cast-iron radiators Givone had converted to hot-water use, a “winwin-win situation: aesthetically beautiful, recycled, and very efcient as a heat sink.” An improved building envelope and circulation system shield the home from brutal winters in the Catskills: The building’s frame is sealed with soybased expanding foam insulation, and the original wavy-glass windows have been hung with an additional layer of coated compression-ft glass, making them as airtight as new double-pane units. The heating system runs on biodiesel fuel, fred by a low-consumption Buderus boiler, and wide-plank wood foorboards in the master bedroom beneft from radiant heat. Givone categorizes the Floating Farmhouse not as an experiment in greening but as an exercise in responsible building; its low carbon footprint was cast back in the 1820s, when the home was built with local materials, delivered by horse and wagon, and fashioned by hand. Such a sensitive restorationmeets-renovation pays homage to that past, both aesthetically and environmentally. It also speaks to an innate desire in this particular homeowner: “A derelict structure inspires possibility where any rational soul would walk (if not run) away. For me, an ‘impossible’ project enables a more intuitive, process-based approach to architecture: remaining open to what the structure and the process reveal and evolving the design in real time.” And while locals may not understand such lengthy eforts to revive a dilapidated rural manor, they surely appreciate the result: a successful marriage of vernacular design to modern domesticity. DWELL

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In the guest bathroom, Givone installed a hand-chiseled sink made of 17th-century marble quarried from the hills outside Rome (above). A section of the farmhouse’s original shingled roof peeks out from under the new raised ceiling in the master bedroom (below).

project iT House architect Taalman Koch Architecture location Pioneertown, California published November 2008

Touch of Glass

The iT House brings together raw industrial aesthetics with the tactics of green design to forge a new home in the sunbaked wilds of California’s east.

text by Frances Anderton photos by Gregg Segal

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If you were planning to build a house in the high desert east of Los Angeles, where temperatures climb higher than 100 degrees Fahrenheit each summer and drop to nearly 32 degrees during the night in winter, what kind of habitat would you choose? A solid enclosure with thick walls and small windows to provide respite from the extreme conditions—or a completely exposed glass box without air-conditioning? Linda Taalman and Alan Koch of Taalman Koch Architects chose the latter. In 2008, the couple completed work on their glass “iT House,” a lovely, minimal home that tests the limits of living lightly on the land in the desert near Joshua Tree National Park in California. Taalman and Koch are Los Angeles–based design partners who earned their stripes with a refned, unobtrusive design for DIA:Beacon in upstate New York. A few years ago, they hatched the idea for the iT House. The name, conceived with amusing chutzpah, doesn’t refer to “information technology,” but rather to “It,” as in hot, as in “It Girl.” Their idea was to create a house from prefabricated structural components and include glass walls on which artists would later apply surface graphics.

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Having built such a home for a client in Orange County, California, they were eager to construct their own. They looked for a site in Los Angeles, but it was too expensive, Taalman says. “We’d been going out to Joshua Tree for a long time, and there was something about that place that kept drawing us back.” So they bought fve acres above quirky Pioneertown, a onetime set for Westerns that has become a tiny community in its own right. They found themselves working on a house that would be a backdrop not just for an artist’s application, but for a stunning, elemental desertscape. The rolling terrain is dotted with large, time-smoothed rocks and arid desert scrub in subtle shades of green, yellow, and gray; there are piñon pines, the occasional Joshua tree, and jumping cholla cacti with clusters of threatening needles. Taalman and Koch started building their house in the middle of 2006, just before their daughter, Oleana, was born. The construction was a labor of love, a sort of 21st-century barn raising during which they and their friends came out on weekends to work together. The result was a 1,100-square-foot house that cost approximately $265,000 to build (excluding the cost of land). They assembled the Bosch aluminum framing system and roofed it in perforated steel decking, creating bedroom and living wings organized around two courtyards. They then installed radiant heating in the foors, and built the cabinets out of Formica or plastic-laminated plywood. These double as solid walls—in fact, they are some of the few

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vertical planes in the house that are not made of glass. The basic thinking, Taalman says, was to “take advantage of industries outside of the traditional domestic building environment. The iT House is a collection of of-the-shelf manufacturing systems that we’ve combined—like the Bosch framing usually used in robotics and the Epic roof construction system used in airports and malls.” But the goal was emphatically not to create a prefab product as an end in itself. Taalman refutes the notion that “architecture, with a snap of the fngers, can follow the automobile industry.” She argues instead that the “fantasy of prefab today, where the building gets driven out of the factory and plopped down” onsite, is simply not realistic in view of the costs and inefciencies of transporting such a large object. “We are not looking to crack the nut of making a cheap, afordable, mass-produced home product,” she says. “We’re looking to make buildings that have merit but that don’t rely on a single contractor and that enable us to take control over the process. We can then specify the drawings and get a high-quality product rapidly assembled onsite.” Having built the light industrial shell, the pair then applied another layer to the house, with an entirely diferent aesthetic: that of the handcrafted and the custom-made. Their artist friends Sarah Morris and Liam Gillick designed a plaid-like grid for the walls, and designer Elody Blanchard created foorto-ceiling curtains for the bedroom and bathroom.

Rejecting overhanging cabinets, the architects grouped all of the kitchen appliances, cupboards, and counters in a single, self-contained island (below left), designed in collaboration with Bulthaup. “There’s an emphasis on convenience in the world, which is all about numbing things,” Alan Koch says. The simplicity of the furnishings and the bare, sealed concrete foor (below) allow the desert views to bathe the room. A suspended freplace by Fire Orb provides a hearth for friends and family to gather around.

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Linda Taalman sits with her daughter, Oleana, in the living room (right) on a metal lounge designed by Kenneth Cobonpue. Glass walls emphasize views and greatly expand the sense of space in the 1,100square-foot house. Behind her is a “fre court” and, beyond that, the bedroom that Taalman shares with Koch.

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“When it snows, it’s magical. You can see the moon rise and you can wake up with the sun.” —Linda Taalman, resident and architect DWELL

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The curtains in the bedroom are made of thick felt, and in the bathroom Blanchard used a cotton blend—in each case, with a mesmerizing pattern of thread-lines and grommets. The iT House builds on ideas explored over the last century: the all-glass house and the house made from industrial components. The desert modernist Albert Frey, as well as L.A.’s Case Study House architects, traded solid walls for glass—and, of course, Philip Johnson put himself on the map with his all-glass house in New Canaan, Connecticut. Architects like Pierre Koenig and Craig Ellwood built with standardized metal components, and this remains a common approach in Europe, frst popularized in the 1970s when the Pompidou Center, by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, made a virtue out of industrial aesthetics. The iT House, however, is among the few that so harmoniously blend high-tech and handmade, harnessing the surrounding landscape. A day spent inside Taalman and Koch’s house is a day

spent marveling at the strange, panoramic beauty of the desert and at the subtlety of colors, both inside and out. As sunlight passes through the angled phases of the day, it transforms the concrete foor and spare furnishings into a desert-modern version of a Dutch interior painting. The other goal of the house was to embrace, not hide from, the elements. Philip Johnson’s glass walls, Koch points out, were hermetically sealed. Theirs are not just operable, they are designed to function “like a sailboat. You’ve got to work the house to make it respond. In the summer, which is very extreme, you close all the east-facing doors in the morning and you open up the west—and then you fip it in the afternoon.” Koch grew up spending summers with his architect grandfather in Ventura County, sleeping outside with his family on cots in a “hobo camp” that his grandfather designed. “I didn’t realize how much being out in a space like that was important to me until we built this house.”

Koch stands with Oleana in the north-side entry court (opposite). The tree-stump table is one of several examples of the raw and hand-hewn details that balance the coolness of the steel structure. On the glass is a graphic by artists Sarah Morris and Liam Gillick. The living space and bedrooms are separated by two small courtyards. Taalman reclines in a small infatable pool in the fre court, facing south toward the desert (below).

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iT House Floor Plan A B C D E F G H

Living Room Kitchen Entrance Court Fire Court Bathroom Master Bedroom Guest Bedroom Mechanical Room

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“We’d been going out to Joshua Tree for a long time, and there was something about that place that kept drawing us back.” —Linda Taalman

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To make such naked shelter possible they employed passive heating and cooling strategies— the windows and sliding doors are made of Solarban 60 glass, with a low-e coating for long-wave radiation—and the roof is confgured so that it blocks the summer sun. In winter, when the sun is lower and temperatures drop, sunlight can penetrate through the windows. Solar power generates hot water and electricity. Despite these eforts, however, the couple admits that the house gets very hot in summer and very cold in winter. But exposure is what they like about it. “It can be really windy sometimes, and I wonder if it’s going to blow away,” says Taalman. “But I’m leery of spaces that are overcontrolled. I like to know if it’s day or night—and when it’s hot, it’s totally diferent than when it’s cold. And when it snows it’s magical. You can see the moon rise and you can wake up with the sun. We don’t use any clocks out here.”

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Taalman bathes Oleana with the bathroom doors opened wide onto the courtyard (bel0w). The bath and basin are by Duravit, the orange wall by 3form. The iT House (right) is an exploration of the couple’s architectural ideas, one that Taalman and Koch built with the help of friends over weekends away from their primary residence in Los Angeles. The glass structure brings the precise and cool together with the wild and untamed.

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Photo: Laconda by Cesar Rubio

3 shapes. 5 patterns. Endless possibilities.

Tile Design by Christopher Deam

heathceramics.com San Francisco

Sausalito

Los Angeles

415-361-5552 x13

415-332-3732 x13

323-965-0800

Dwell Patterns, a tile collection designed by Heath Ceramics in collaboration with Dwell. The results are endless patterns and color combinations.

GL ASS FACADE FOCUS

Shedded Bliss A pref efab abri r ca cate ted d sh shed ed sitted d on a Finniish isl slan and d pr prov ovid ides es a pe perf rfec ectt su summ mmer get etaw way ay.. text b text by d Kushins Jordan Jor photo by pho Arsi Ikäheim monen project p Ga den Sh Gar hed architect arc ct Avanto Archiitec tects t location F land Fin d published pub e Decemb Dec em er/January y 2012 2

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Linda Bergroth had gardening and storage in miind ind wh hen she deeveloped this scaled-do own wn pre refab prototyp pe.. The Finn Fi innis nn nish ish de desi s gn si gner e collaboraated dw wiith h t Arc rchi chi hite teects of o Hel elsi siink nkii for for two tw wo Avvanto an nto y arrs to perfe ye erfe fect ctt a com ompa paactt uni pact n t— —no now avai av a labl blee fo or pu urc rcha h se fro rom m ou utd tdoo or bran bran nd Ke K kk kil i ä— ä—th that at art rtfu fu ull llyy merg merges rgess sh hed d and d gre reen enho en hous ho u e in us into to onee woo ooddfram fr am med ed,, gl glas las a ss wa wall l ed ll e sttruc uctu ture tu re. Seens n in ng it itss gr g ea e te terr pote po ote tent n ia nt ial, l, sh hee adap ad dap a ted teed on ne in into to a war a mm we weat at athe herr he reetrea trreat eaat fo f r he hers rsel ellf on the small mall isl slan and an d o ne ow ned byy her parren ents t , wh ts wher erre sh s e spen sp pen e t ch hil ildh dhoo dh oo od su summ mmer mm e s. er s. Goi o ng ou ut tto o sleep in th he sh shed ed d migght sou ound ou nd d li like kee an admo k oniti nition on forr som ome, e but u for Berg Be rrggro r th the oppor o tuni nity tyy is d diivi v ne n . “T The he frstt nigght ht I spe pentt the here re beat eaat an any fve f vee-sta -starr ho h hote ote tel or o cha hate te teau au,” au , she h saayys. ys. s “N Notthi hingg hass eve ver ffeeltt as lu l xuriou us. s.” 103

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PROP STYLING BY LAUREN SHIELDS

Concrete

What is it about concrete that causes modernists to return to it time and again? We take an architectural journey that spans the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Peru, South Africa, and Portugal to witness how builders interpret the material. DWELL

Photo by Victor Prado

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text by Erika Heet For Casa Cubo, or the Cube House (below), completed in 2012 in São Paulo, architect Marcio Kogan and his associate Suzana Glogowski integrated the open-air living room with the garden. Two concrete stories resting on sturdy piers house the other rooms and are punctuated by metal screens that can be pulled shut for privacy. The interiors are by Diana Radomysler.

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Marcio Kogan São Paulo architect Marcio Kogan and his frm, Studio MK27, combat the city’s sprawl and torturous trafc with the most soothing of salves: restrained, tactile architecture. Following the Brazilian modernist tradition, concrete is one of Kogan’s chosen materials. Infusing spare spaces with life, concrete functions well as a framing device, the flmmaker-turned-architect says. On flm sets, he learned how to create emotional efects in ways audiences don’t notice, and he has taken a similar tactic with concrete. A favorite maneuver is to place heavy poured walls so they seem to hover ethereally, as if a slight push could yield vast spaces beyond.

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For the Paraty House (left), Kogan again worked with Glogowski and Radomysler. “The spatial volume and the placement of the boxes are reinforced with the use of concrete,” he says. As with Kogan’s other projects, Pinheiro House (below left), a collaboration with Lair Reis, plantings soften the concrete. dwell.com/marcio-kogan g Head online to hear more from the Brazilian architect on working with concrete.

Do potential clients now expect you to design with concrete? We try to move [forward] and do new things, but many times they expect it.

Name some specifc projects in which you think concrete was implemented to its greatest efect, and why. Is this to say that you won’t again design a white box? Probably. I tried before, and the client refused. I tried to do the white box again. I think that’s interesting because in the beginning of your career, it’s very difcult to have a client that can do a big project. It’s the main problem in the beginning. Now the problem is that all the clients that can hire us, they expect something, and if you want to do something diferent they say, “No, I have this friend,” or “I saw the picture in the magazine and I want this house.” DWELL

Are there limitations to working with concrete and, if so, how do you solve them? The principal limitation is that which we call the “investment level” of the client. An example is the use of white concrete. For a better fnish, it is necessary to use stainless steel in the fttings, which, monetarily, makes the use of this material not viable. We have already proposed white concrete in some projects; however, it has never been approved by the client.

Q& A

When working with concrete primarily, how do you keep the design fresh? By integrating a mixture of other materials such as wood, as you suggested? Maintaining a fresh design is not the objective of Studio MK27 when using concrete as one of the principal elements in our projects. The fresh design is the result of the language of the project and the designed spatiality for the same. The main characteristic of our concrete [work] is a contemporary revisit of the concrete used during the 1950s—a raw way of exhibiting the material, with a refned fnish.

The Cube House, when observed from afar, appears like a pure cube, with all of the sides clean, without imperfections. On closer observation, it can be seen that the cube has imperfections—the concrete sides display the lathes of the forms used. In this case, the concrete is a primordial part of the fnal result achieved. The structure, added to the texture of the facades, could only be done through the use of concrete.

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PHOTOS BY FERNANDO GUERRA (CUBE AND PINHEIRO HOUSE), NELSON KON (PARATY HOUSE)

Why do people respond to concrete, and why do you work with it? In the beginning, we used to do [only] white boxes, and one day one client came in the ofce and said, “I want to do a project, but not white. I want natural materials, rough materials.” This happened maybe 15 years ago. And the result in this house—it’s called the LC House, and I like it very much—is a mixture of very modernist lines with the natural material, and you get to be more crazy, more “lifeful.” I think this mixture works very, very well. We avoid painting facades, mainly because São Paulo is a really polluted city. If you paint, then you have to paint again in six months or a year. So then you begin to fnd alternative solutions for the facade. Brazil has a tradition with concrete. People began to work with it again maybe 15 years ago. The engineers, they forgot how to work with concrete, and they have just begun learning how to do it again. The technology… I like it. I also like the mixture of wood, concrete, and stone.

“Brazil has a tradition with concrete. People began to work with it again maybe 15 years ago. The engineers, they forgot how to work with concrete, and they have just begun learning how to do it again.” 107

text by Michael Dumiak photos by Jens Passoth

project EggO House architect A69 Architects location Prague, Czech Republic published May 2008

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A69 Architects was called upon to match concrete with concrete for this family home in Prague. The roof slab of the EggO House serves as an artificial horizon, blocking gazes from the high-rises next door.

The clean-cut concrete roof slab of Prague’s EggO House frames a backyard full of spruce and apple trees (opposite). The ovoid concrete hole (above) not only gives the house its name—after all, it is an egg-shaped O—but it also gives clear visual definition to an outdoor space that risks

being dominated by the hulking tower blocks next door. The roof weighs an incredible 120 metric tons. All the concrete was poured onsite, and the whole thing is held aloft by thin steel beams. The backyard is the same plot of land in which EggO resident Tomáš Ru ˚ žičká once played as a child.

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The tension between old and new is easy to see in Prague, where Art Deco housing butts up uncomfortably against utilitarian tower blocks left behind after the Soviet invasion of 1968. Even the homeowners’ attitudes reflect this. “I’m used to that antique style and always thought I would live like that,” Johana Ru˚žičková says. “I know that conflict.”

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The eye-level concrete slab slicing the sightline down a short lane at the end of the Žižkov number nine tram is a surprise, even if you’re looking for it. But with EggO, a 2,300-square-foot single-level home built by Prague architects A69, the surprises aren’t limited to the exterior. EggO sits low on the street corner next to a row of prewar red-shingled houses. Its signature feature is a six-and-a-half- to eight-and-a-half-inch white concrete slab that stays straight and level even as the street slopes away. What isn’t apparent until one enters the home and walks a few steps past the garage is that a large oval hole has been cut out of the concrete to frame an inner garden. Instead of landscaping around the house, A69 built the house around the landscape. “My husband Tomáš used to live here with his parents in the old house next door,” says Johana Růžičková. Smiling and relaxing at the broad dining table, she adds: “Right here was his childhood place. It was just a garden, full of trees; it was a tree alley. These ugly buildings were not here.” Johana is referring to the scene across the street, a long wall of what Germans call plattenbau: shoeboxshaped concrete prefab housing estates, rising eight stories and looming over the entire block. In Berlin, Leipzig, or Moscow, there’s an argument to be made for the much-maligned plattenbau, but it probably won’t go very far at this table. When Tomáš Růžičká returned to his childhood home as an adult and took in the altered surroundings, he fgured he would never live here again; a house underneath this brutal block of concrete would feel too public, as if 400 pairs of eyes were looking right at him. A ruddy, vigorous man with a clean-shaven head, Tomáš is straightforward about the difculties involved. “I’m an engineer: heating, air-conditioning, electricity. That’s my advantage. But it was horrible to start my own house,” he says, laughing. “My friend Stanislav Fiala is an architect. He said, ‘You’ll have trees there. It’ll be perfect.’ For me it was the frst step. My way is to believe the architects.” And so Tomáš turned to A69, a frm led by three architects all born in the tumultuous year of 1969. The architects decided to introduce even more concrete, pouring 1,765 cubic feet of it onsite to form a singular roof slab weighing 120 metric tons. “How to live in this garden?” muses architect Jaroslav Wertig. “How to use the garden without being dominated by the buildings across the street. That was the complication. So we created this opening in the roof. It originally should have been a circle, but when we followed the trees that were here already, it became ovoid.” The egg-shaped opening that gave the house its name also works to defne an expanded sense of personal space, he notes, highlighting and focusing attention on the yard with its spruce and apple trees reaching through to the sky. EggO is about where concrete is, and where it isn’t. A third of the oval’s diameter gives shape to a curved interior glass wall; the glass is attached to slender steel columns using the same technique automakers use

Johana works at home in the living room, defned as much by its cinder-block wall as by the light coming in through recessed windows above (left). The house, while open, fuid, and centered by the circular outdoor space, is also well partitioned, allowing both Johana and Tomáš to maintain private home ofces. The dining space (below) achieves its own clarity through a consistent color palette and strong angled lines. The pendant light adds a sculptural detail.

to seal windshields into car frames. These windows frame the main living space, gazing out onto the lawn and trees. The other side of the living room features a false wall surrounding a freplace, above which rectangular windows let eastern sunlight into the room. Those steel columns also bear the load of the concrete roof, with huge girders stationed in the garage. The girders are hidden from view by a checkerboard wall of steel baskets displaying rocks, bricks, and chunks of concrete saved from the construction site, held in place with wire gabions (a detail Wertig says was inspired by Herzog & de Meuron’s Dominus winery in Napa Valley). Another, thinner slab extends from the back of EggO to abut Tomáš’s boyhood home. It is covered with grass, creating an elevated garden accessible from the second foor of the old house, where Tomáš keeps his ofce. But this detail was also added so his grandmother, Vera, could get fresh air without having to head downstairs or even leave the house. After all, the spaces of the house are not clearly delineated. Walking from the patio to the living room, or from the kitchen into the garden, doesn’t feel like going in or out—it feels like moving from a glass room into a green room. As open as the house is, it was important that the interior could be partitioned. Because both Tomáš and Johana work from home, the entryway seals of to provide a place for the couple to meet clients. 112

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In the end, the house is driven by insularity, closing out the city instead of embracing it—a paradox not uncommon to Prague: Many residents desperately want to get out of the city while at the same time loving it. But the Žižkov district and A69 may represent a broader city shake-up. “I met the local planner at a party,” Wertig says, “and I asked him, ‘If I came to you two years ago with this project, would I get permission?’ And he said, ‘No, of course not!’” The planner may have been kidding, but Žižkov, once working-class, residential, and plain, is changing. It’s now home to bars and rock clubs, and a new Metro connection is on the way. But with a hearty stock of Art Deco and classical buildings downtown, new architecture in Prague is uncommon—and local attitudes toward new buildings refect that. There is also latent public resentment at not having had a voice in urban matters under communism. “I’m used to that antique style and always thought I would live like that,” Johana explains. She never thought she would want to live in something contemporary. “I know that confict. I needed time to change the old things in my mind. I like this space. It’s so free.” As the house grows up, the trees will form a leafy wall, with vines growing over the wire baskets and gabions. This means that EggO has saved its biggest surprise for last: 120 metric tons of concrete will vanish into green, weightless and fully camoufaged from its surroundings. EggO House Floor Plan A B C D

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At night, the curved geometry of the house becomes even more clear. Lit from within, the house stands out against its backdrop of architecturally unexciting houses. Here, Johana and Tomáš look out onto an enclosed yard, a private space cut out of the bigger city.

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text by Grant nt Gibson photos by Hertha Hurnaus

project Moinian & Meili Residence architect Felix Oesch location Eglisa isau, Switzerland published February r 2009

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Built for a Spartan-minded young family, architect Felix Oesch’s spare, concrete prefab outside Zurich is a marvel of clean living.

The rear of a house outside Zurich by architect Felix Oesch looks onto a lush backyard (left), while the entrance evokes hard lines (above). The rough, industrial prefabricated concrete panels by the German manufacturer Syspro are the building blocks of the home. The house is located on the busy Schafauserstrasse (right), which links Switzerland and Germany, and therefore part of Oesch’s brief was to reduce noise and orient the building toward the nearby Rhine.

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For a nation of only 7.5 million, Switzerland has always punched well above its weight in terms of design. During the interwar years, the “Swiss Style” played a pioneering role in contemporary graphic design; today the Swiss furniture manufacturer Vitra leads the pack, and the likes of Herzog & de Meuron and Peter Zumthor reside at architecture’s bleeding edge. Of course, the country was also the birthplace of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, or Le Corbusier, as he’s better known. It’s impossible not to think of Corbu as I step out of the car and onto the driveway outside Christof Meili and Farzaneh Moinian’s home. Although only two years old, it owes a signifcant debt to the godfather of modernism, as its architect, Felix Oesch, is happy enough to confess. “There was never a discussion about style,” he tells me. “When Christof and Farzaneh told me one day that they’d seen the Petite Maison, then for me it was clear. My design would ft.” The house is a short walk from the center of Eglisau, a small town 20 minutes from Zurich Airport, on a slope between the bustling Schafauserstrasse, which links Switzerland and Germany, and the Rhine. The manner in which the house functions is largely dictated by its locale. The architect’s job was to reduce the noise from the road and orient the building south toward the beautiful, almost emeraldgreen river. However, its look was a more personal choice and perhaps betrays the couple’s roots in design and architecture. Meili trained as an urban planner before becoming an IT consultant, and Moinian is an industrial designer who has worked on projects such as the Transrapid system for Deutsche Bahn and interiors for Swiss International Air Lines when not looking after their daughter, Anaïs. The pair, who met when their companies shared an ofce space, commissioned Oesch after seeing one of his houses in a Swiss design magazine. As all four of us sit down for an impromptu barbecue, it’s plain that,

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After walking through the front door, visitors enter directly into the kitchen and living space (opposite top). The interior is minimal, using timber and concrete. It also provides spectacular views across the river. Christof Meili and his daughter, Anaïs,

lounge on a Transform sofa by Moroso (opposite, bottom). The homeowners are also avid collectors of contemporary furniture. Their ofce (below) includes the Living Tower designed by Vernon Panton for Vitra. Meili makes tea in the kitchen (above).

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aesthetically, both architect and clients sing from the same hymn sheet. “We were really lucky,” confrms Meili, “because Farzaneh and I have the same taste. We both wanted a modern, minimal concrete house.” Handy, because that’s precisely what they got. Descend a fight of steps from the parking area and open the heavy larch timber entrance door, and you arrive in a huge kitchen, dining, and living space that Oesch describes as “a strange kind of church”—one that provides a panoramic view of the Rhine and neighboring woods. The link between them is a partially covered deck, which allows the family to eat outside even when it’s raining. Down the banisterless stairs, there is a second living room as well as two decent-size bedrooms—one for Anaïs, the other presently spare—and a rather intriguing bathroom, intriguing because it’s a mirror image of itself: A pair of toilets sit side by side, and there are two sinks and twin showers. It can be left as one linear space or divided by a sliding door, presumably for when their daughter begins to demand some privacy. “We wanted it to have the feeling of the length of the house,” says Meili. Natural light comes in via a letterbox-shaped window that runs the length of the outside wall and another slot window that allows you to look out into the garden as you’re having a bath. Finally, there is an understated master bedroom furnished with a storage cupboard, a double futon bed, a mirror, and not much else. Though the house is pristine, the garden, somewhat surprisingly, has a rougher feel to it. Judging from the couple’s taste in cool minimalism one might be forgiven for expecting their lawn to resemble the 18th green at Augusta. However, this is a family that enjoys the outdoors. They regularly swim in the Rhine after work (which explains the outdoor shower), and the kayaks hanging by the log pile allude to Meili’s competitive background in the sport. So perhaps their slightly unusual agreement with a local farmer makes sense: When the

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grass is ready and the wildfowers are out, he brings a fock of his sheep to graze, and the gardening is thus done easily and organically. Oesch explains the reasoning behind this: “I didn’t want to change the landscape. I wanted the house to look like it’s always been here.” Which of course it hasn’t. In fact, it took nine months to build the house using a prefabricated panel system developed by the German manufacturer Syspro that’s more commonly used for building cellars rather than entire houses. Each panel is made up of two outer layers of 2.4-inch-thick concrete that act as the bread of the sandwich. Inside there’s a core layer of concrete as well as seven inches of insulation. This means the panels, which arrived at the site with all the holes cut for the fxtures and fttings, are relatively light and easy to maneuver. Subsequently, construction was a question of ftting them all together like Legos. For Oesch, the benefts of the process are obvious. “I like prefab because you’ve got all the control in your ofce. You have most of the control working on the plan and not working onsite. I don’t really like working onsite—I don’t like to scream at people. When I know it’s right, I know it’s right. I don’t need to discuss it.” The house is also hugely efcient. Geothermal energy for hot water and underfoor heating (which negates the need for ugly radiators) is provided by a pair of 300-foot-deep boreholes that transfer warmth from the ground to the house through a heat pump. Meanwhile, used air is taken out from the bathroom and kitchen and pumped back into the earth, where energy is efectively stored for a later date. Heating and cooling air is pumped into every other living area of the house. Elsewhere, the concrete fume on a freplace in the downstairs living room provides some thermal mass for the whole house. This is a remarkably inexpensive house to heat. In fact, the architect jokes that the huge light sculpture, made up of two rows of

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The bathroom (above) is a long, linear space with a letterbox window to provide natural light. There are two toilets, a pair of sinks, and two showers. The master bedroom (below) is equally Spartan. At the bottom of the stairs is a second living space that includes a

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freplace. The couple couldn’t fnd a television that didn’t clutter the cool minimalism so they prefer to use a projector to watch movies (right). The sofa was designed by Barber Osgerby for Cappellini, and the Djinn chair is by Olivier Mourgue.

bulbs, hanging in the main living space uses as much energy as the rest of the house put together. Wandering around, two things are instantly clear: This is a couple who loathe clutter and have a passion for contemporary furniture. The house is full of design classics—Verner Panton being a particular favorite. Even the miniature furniture in their daughter’s bedroom, which has been in the family for two generations, has a touch of Jean Prouvé about it. And there’s absolutely no mess. To live like this takes a good deal of rigor and plenty of storage. Look around and everything has crisp, clean lines. In the kitchen, for instance, the stove’s extractor hood is hidden, popping up from the counter only when it’s required. Naturally, I’m intrigued by how the relatively recent addition of Anaïs has changed the way Meili and Moinian live. Is it possible to have a young child and maintain this level of super-tidy minimalism? “Life is just diferent in general,” Moinian says with a shrug, seemingly unfazed, “and I’m not working all the time now, so that’s diferent as well.” “I think we won’t have a big playing area,” Meili chips in. “We really like a minimal space.” And while they’ll almost certainly have to make adaptations when their daughter starts toddling, I’m inclined to believe them. The relationship between architect and client can be extremely fraught in a major building project, yet if there were any problems during this process then it’s almost impossible to detect as our meal draws to a close and we go for a walk around the chocolate box–beautiful town. In fact it would seem the scheme has turned clients and architect into frm friends. As I make my way back to Zurich Airport in Oesch’s pickup truck, it strikes me that for all the concrete and iron discipline, the neat trick they’ve pulled of is giving a house that in the wrong hands might have turned into a museum piece a sense of warmth.

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Tucked behind a high enclosure in Lima, an angular house attuned to its site takes shape.

Snake Charmer text by Sarah Amelar photos by Cristobal Palma

Casa Serpiente, or “Snake House,” is named for the way its undulant form twists through a tree-studded garden in Lima, Peru. Its owners, a married couple named Irzio and Lisette—a restaurateur and a chef, respectively—had pined for what Lisette calls “something contemporary, surrounded by green, with lots of light and living spaces all on one foor.” Designed by 51-1 Arquitectos, a Lima-based practice headed by Manuel de Rivero, César Becerra, and Fernando Puente Arnao, the resulting house takes the form of an angular “snake” that ramps up, generating its own rolling topography across the site. One enters the 4,300-square-foot house via a long, wood-planked ramp, with fush lights sprinkled “like stars in the night sky,” says Lisette. Well-placed transparencies and foliage balance Serpiente’s openness and privacy within the city, while the sinuous form invites internal cross-communication. Bubble-like portholes in the concrete pool, for example, let Gioia, fve, wave to her father in his study while she swims. “There’s a real sense of being connected,” says Lisette.

project Casa Serpiente architect 51-1 Arquitectos location Lima, Peru published May 2013

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On a 15,000-square-foot site in Lima, Peru, 51-1 Arquitectos devised a concrete-dominated house that meanders around 25 existing trees. Near the entrance (opposite) is the main living cube, above which is the study (above and top), among the few ground-foor rooms.

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text by Kerryn Fischer photos by Elsa Young

project Lot Four Two Four architect Gregory Katz Architecture location Norwood, South Africa published May 2008

Katz’s Cradle

Gregory and Caryn Katz are dwarfed beneath the cantilevered concrete overhang housing the bedroom on the upper level of their house in Norwood, South Africa (opposite). The stackable glass doors that run beneath allow the house to open to the yard and swimming pool, and soften the severity of the concrete. Inspired by an old technique that

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Gregory Katz proves that three times is a charm with his trio of concrete homes that challenge the status quo in this quiet Johannesburg suburb.

Le Corbusier experimented with in the 1930s, Gregory has imprinted the project’s name, Lot Four Two Four, on the exterior entrance wall, using laser-cut Perspex on concrete (right). The shared service road behind each unit allows for easy access to the garage (above) and enabled Gregory to maximize views at the front of each of the three structures.

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“I’ve never understood the distinction between domestic and commercial architecture,” says South African architect Gregory Katz. “A lot of what I do is an attempt to use engineering materials in a domestic setting in a new, clever way.” One of essentially three identical concrete boxes, the Norwood home Gregory moved into months before marrying his actress wife, Caryn, cuts an incongruous but captivating sight in this leafy middle-class suburb of Johannesburg. The trio of houses contrasts with the area’s mishmash of architectural styles, where a glut of security complexes are characterized by cookie-cutter design and little space in between. The three 3,660-square-foot dwellings at Lot 424 share over a third of an acre and answer a common desire for space, security, shared maintenance, and even a sense of community. Achieving this in an economical fashion wasn’t easy, but for Gregory, who thrives on the research and development side of a design project, it was all part of the process. “I love the solidity, strength, and neutrality of of-shutter concrete,” Gregory says. “You can build pretty quickly with it, and the absence of fttings and fnishes made the economics convincing. It wouldn’t be cost-efective for one house but it is for three.” The units, which took just 18 months to build, are designed with a shared-access service road that runs behind the buildings and, at 20 feet wide, is big enough to drive cars down and provide of-street parking for visitors. “Each unit is designed so that the more open side of the house looks onto the private sides of the neighboring houses,” explains Gregory. The slope of the ground facilitates this too, with each unit stepping down a bit so that none of the windows correlate. Gregory’s ability to exploit concrete’s strength is visible in his own home, a huge expanse that feels light and spacious thanks to the absence of a single load-bearing wall. A large aperture of stackable glazed doors softens the divide between indoors and outdoors, and the freestanding staircase and cantilevered bedroom keep the path of light and space dynamic. Upstairs, the openness continues in the main bedroom, spare bedroom, and home ofce where Gregory bases his practice. The modular design allows the other units to utilize the ofce space for a third bedroom and study. “I’m all for modular design; it’s easy to manipulate and control, and the spin is that it allows tremendous fexibility,” Gregory says. “So the house is designed to accommodate the demands of a nursery, restaurant, or ofce in the future. I believe that if you put all this energy into a building, it has to be around for a long time.” But it took a while for the developer to get the concept. “It’s an incredibly simple box, and so initially, it was difcult to convince the developer that we could surpass these connotations and make concrete ‘warm and homey,’” Gregory says. “I appreciate the superslick minimalist look, but it’s hard to get right in this country, and I don’t see the point in doing something if you can’t do it properly.” Studying architecture at Columbia University in New York and working for Daniel Libeskind in Los Angeles has given Gregory some perspective on this. 128

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Cognizant of concrete’s signifcant carbon footprint, Gregory built with the future in mind: The modular structure of his home could also accommodate a nursery, restaurant, or ofce, as suggested by the various seating and dining arrangements situated throughout the house, particularly in the dining and living area. The space is outftted with an Eames chair and an unfnished wood shelving unit and dining table. The room opens to the yard and pool, enhancing the room’s circulation to the outdoors.

Libeskind “taught me the value of experimentation,” Gregory says. “Where architecture is most often concerned with moral decisions, Daniel is unable to be anything but playful and courageous.” Another infuence is Zvi Hecker, a maverick architect with whom Gregory worked during a gap year in Tel Aviv and Berlin. “His experimentalism with materials and his insistence on not settling for what’s available, but rather reinterpreting it, has set me in good stead coming back to South Africa.” For Gregory, Johannesburg is a great place to be an architect. Its origins as a swashbuckling goldmining city where fortunes were quickly made and lost resonates even now, most notably in an architectural landscape where developers are all-powerful, and buildings go up and come down with little regard for longevity or the preservation of architectural value. “It’s an exciting place to be as there’s much to be done, but it’s not for the fainthearted,” says Gregory, who started his own architectural practice four years ago—three years after returning to South Africa. “You have to work within what is achievable in this country,” he says. “I tend to work closely with the builders, which eases the process. In fact, with this house, the builder ate most of the cost of the experimentation on the staircase, as he was just as passionate about getting it right.” After three attempts, strength-tested in situ each time, Gregory is particularly pleased with the high-tech result, achieved using a composite system of welded steel L-profles, 130

expanded mesh, and polymer fbers in the concrete. It was a similar journey with the concrete fnishes, starting with the boundary wall, for which Gregory used heavy-grain timber as shutters so that the resulting molded concrete retains the impression of the wood grain. He also used laser-cut Perspex to imprint text on walls, inspired by an old technique that Le Corbusier used in the 1930s. “There’s an alchemy to concrete that allows it to take on many guises at very little cost,” Gregory says. The concrete staircase is pigmented black, a durable choice for a high-trafc area that can withstand nicks and scratches, and the slab on the terrace has been ground to expose the black fecks of Johannesburg granite used as an aggregate. Concrete countertops in the kitchen have been fnished simply with an invisible sealant, while the windowsills in the bedrooms form deep slabs to resemble foating shelves. The house has also been designed to be thermally efcient, with the overhang on the terrace carefully calibrated to block the summer sun but capitalize on it in winter, when the sun is lower and the light comes through the huge glass doors in the living area. “Our Highveld winters are good because they’re sunny, so the concrete absorbs heat during the day and gives it of at night,” notes Gregory. The radiant heating is also embedded directly into the slab of concrete. In summer the big openings and cross ventilation ensure a thorough fow of air throughout the house. A self-confessed minimalist, Gregory is the frst to admit that the architecture can’t stand alone, and MATERIAL SOURCEBOOK

With Gregory and Caryn both working from home, it was crucial that their ofce (a communal space located of the landing upstairs) accommodate separateness of space and privacy (left). The showerand-bath-in-one (below) allows for the open feel of the house to translate within the bathroom. Simple concrete slabs function as countertops with inexpensive tiles laid foor to ceiling.

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that the stereotypically masculine order of the house needs a feminine counterpoint. “There’s a lot of clutter around with Caryn,” he quips. “But I love it. This place needs to be lived in, and she makes it happen. The color is all her,” he says, pointing to the bright yellow kitchen cabinets. “Gregory enjoys the calculus whereas I’m more spontaneous and don’t mind living with the consequences of imperfection,” says Caryn. “But I trust him. I initially chose a paint swatch called Canary Yellow, which admittedly I loved because of the name. Gregory then agonized over the fnal color choice, but eventually he settled on this citrus hue and of course it’s perfect.” They both marvel at how grown-up the house feels compared to their previous Art Deco apartment. “At frst I thought I was moving into a mission statement for Gregory’s head, which was a little intimidating,” Caryn muses. “It’s taken a while to get used to it, but I’m surprised at how quickly I’ve managed to make the space my own. What I hadn’t anticipated was how the house makes all my little personal details like photos and tablecloths look quite spectacular. In our previous space they just blended in, but here they stand out. I really like that.” And when you consider the marital harmony this must aford, it’s the design’s most impressive accomplishment to date.

The three townhouses have a shared service road and garage access (above). Caryn was thrilled to discover that all her personal details look spectacular when ofset against the solemnity of concrete. In profle, the freestanding staircase is the most outstanding design accent (left). Gregory’s love afair with concrete is evinced by his distinct lack of embellishment, particularly on the exterior (opposite). The only decorative fourishes are those occurring in the interior, like the gentle arc of a Castiglioni Arco lamp.

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Certifed child-labor-free. Ask for the GoodWeave® label. GoodWeave.org

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project Valley House architect Guilherme Vaz location Vieira do Minho, Portugal published September 2007

FACADE FOCUS

text by Kieran Long photo by David Hughes

“Nature to me is something quite frightening,” says Guilherme Vaz of the weekend home the young architect designed for his father in Portugal. Vaz, whose practice is in Porto, harbors a city-dweller’s skepticism of the outdoors. He is not one to speak platitudes about blurring boundaries between inside and out, and in many ways, the house is a bulwark: What is artifcial is contained within this concrete shoebox of a building, and what’s wild is kept out, observable from generous terraces and huge windows. The concrete exterior of the house is rough—due in some measure to the inexperience of the builder and to the architect’s intent—and the rugged fnish makes the side of the house look like another retaining wall.

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With its simple rectangular form, Valley House has an infrastructural presence in the landscape, making it appear as if the house is holding back a steep hill. Despite being meticulously maintained, the house’s pristine concrete walls still allow bits of unruly vegetation to fnd their way onto the facade.

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Jeff Herr Photography

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Turkel. This way home. www.turkeldesign.com [email protected] 617.868 .1867

PROP STYLING BY LAUREN SHIELDS

The Extras: Earth, Stone, Plastic, Composite Steel and glass have come to define “modern” for many, but there’s more than one way to deliver a forward-thinking aesthetic. Rammed earth, marble, stone, plastic, and even ordinary bricks can be deployed to create a home that is every bit as up to date as a Mies-ian pavilion. DWELL

Photo by Victor Prado

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text by Erika Heet Richard Meier was steered toward using travertine for the Getty Center in Los Angeles (bel0w right) by a building code that would not allow for a perfectly white facade, forcing him to explore a wide variety of options. The architect used travertine from the same Italian quarry for the wall outside the building housing the Ara Pacis in Rome (below left).

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Richard Meier Notable for his commanding buildings clad in bright white aluminum, architect Richard Meier, who recently celebrated 50 years in the industry, has become increasingly comfortable working with stone. It was his work on the Getty Center in Los Angeles— for which he hand-picked, quarried, and “guillotined” 1.2 million square feet of beige travertine into one of the most recognizable institutional facades in the world—that made his name synonymous with stone. Here, he gives us the inside track on travertine, granite, and beyond.

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Designed by Eliel Saarinen and completed in 1948, the Des Moines Art Center (left) has undergone two additions, the frst by I.M. Pei in 1968 and the second by Meier in 1985. Meier connected the new section to the other two by cladding it in porcelain and granite. For the Neugebauer House in Naples, Florida (below left), Meier continued the stone from the inside of the house to the exterior walkways. dwell.com/richard-meier Visit our website to read more of our exclusive interview with Richard Meier.

And because of the process, the pieces on the conveyor belt were about eight inches wide, so after it was cut and cleft, we cut it so the middle piece, which was a by-product of the process, could be used as paving, so there was no waste of material. And we got the stone for the facade that we wanted. You used travertine again for the Ara Pacis Museum in Rome. How does it difer from what you did at the Getty and how does it interact with the marble on the Ara Pacis itself? Well with the design of the Ara Pacis, which was done after the Getty, I fgured, if you’re working in Rome, you should use stone from Rome. There’s travertine everywhere in Rome, but not like what we have at the Ara Pacis. It’s from the same quarry as the Getty’s. The walls for the Ara Pacis are for the most part not in the space where the Ara Pacis is, so there’s no direct connection. It works beautifully because the Ara Pacis itself is much whiter than the travertine.

Why was granite cladding the best material to use for the Des Moines Art Center addition? The original building was designed by Eliel Saarinen, and then there was an addition in the ’60s by I.M. Pei. This is like a third addition, so the building wasn’t going to mimic either of the previous two parts of it but had to connect to it. And it seemed to me it had to in some way harmonize with the existing buildings both in terms of its materials as well as in terms of the scale. What’s the most difcult stone to work with? I don’t think there’s one stone that’s more difcult than any other. For the most part when we use it in the way we did at the Getty, you can read each piece of stone because of the void at the joint, which is a clearer reading of the stone. By draining the water behind it, there’s no staining, and the air pollution doesn’t leave a residue on the surface. The smog in Los Angeles is horrifc, so you don’t want that on your building.

STONE Q&A

PHOTOS BY SCOTT FRANCES/OTTO (GETTY CENYER AND NEUGEBAUER), ROLAND HALBE (ARA PACIS), WALTER BIBIKOW/GETTY IMAGES (DES MOINES ART CENTER)

After your design for the Getty Center was complete, you really became known for working with stone. Tell us about your experience learning about travertine at the Bagni di Tivoli quarry in Italy. When we were chosen as the architects for the Getty Center, we had to go through a whole conditional-use permit to build on the site, and one of the conditions was that the buildings couldn’t be white. I thought, that’s fne, the Getty is an institution that’s going to be around for a long time. We wanted to use a material that had a sense of permanence. We got samples of stone from just about every quarry in the world in our model shop in Los Angeles. We had enough stone to build most of the buildings, in samples, and I kept looking at stone, and at some point someone said, “What about travertine?” I said, “Nah, I know what travertine looks like—Lincoln Center is made out of travertine—I want something that has more texture.” [The Italian stone artisan] Carlo Mariotti said to me, “Well, we could get some texture in travertine.” So he invented this guillotine that sort of cut the stone. In the beginning we got a lot of gravel; it didn’t work, and then after quite a lot of experimentation we got it to work and to cut the stone in the rough fnish that you see in the building today.

“The Getty is an institution of permanence and longevity, and the stone refects that.” DWELL

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Studio eM Design’s rammed-earth home in Corrales, New Mexico, updates the regional adobe archetype into a hallmark of sustainable design.

Earth Moves text by Charles C. Poling photos by Kirk Gittings

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project Rammed Earth Home architect Studio eM Design location Corrales, New Mexico published July/August 2013

Roger and Mary Downey’s 3,200-square-foot rammed-earth home seems to foat next to the forest along the Rio Grande in semirural Corrales, New Mexico. While the home’s design and materials nod to the neighboring adobe farmhouses and agricultural sheds, architect Efthimios Maniatis of Studio eM Design calls them an amalgam of “modern contemporary regionalism,” governed by Roger’s strict mandate for minimalism. Within that aesthetic, Maniatis packaged ecofriendly features around the thermal properties of the rammed-earth walls. Builders make these walls by mixing dirt with 10 percent Portland cement and 6 to 10 percent water, then pouring and compacting the mud into wood forms in eight-inch “lifts.” Subtly varied colors and textures mark these lovely strata. “The colors change all day with the light,” the architect says. He also points out the material’s tactility: “Everyone goes to the rammed earth and feels it. It’s like having a cat—you can touch it all day long.” MATERIAL SOURCEBOOK

Roger Downey stands in the house that architect Efthimios Maniatis designed for him and his wife, Mary, on the banks of the Rio Grande in Corrales, New Mexico (below). The structure’s rammed-earth walls (below and opposite) required no wood framing or fnishing,

limiting construction materials and waste. The walls also didn’t use any mortar or plaster, signifcantly cutting labor costs. The result is a no-fuss, low-maintenance house where the Downeys can enjoy retirement and their property at their own pace.

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Studio eM Design countered the harsh climate of the New Mexico desert with a passive solar design that blocks heat and sun while maximizing natural daylight. Marrying the interior with the outdoors informed the design, as did the concept of subtraction: “If you do it with two, then you can do it with one,” Maniatis says, articulating Roger’s algebra of minimalism. Another key move was a nod to traditional adobe architecture. And since the owners are “all about impermanence,” the home’s natural materials were a crucial design element. Mixed with a small percentage of Portland cement (a natural, nontoxic version), the earthen walls could someday foreseeably “melt back into the river,” says the architect. Roger, who retired from the insurance business he started in 1975 and now raises racing mules, and Mary, a former Catholic nun now involved with the Albuquerque Buddhist community, gave Studio eM general design parameters of “glass, openness, simplicity.” One major directive was to “honor the tree,” referring to a particular 85-year-old cottonwood on the property. Landscape designer Judith Wong restored the acre lot to its natural state: riverside meadow. A hidden, gravity-fed water-harvesting system of gutters and underground plumbing distributes all roof runof to the grasses surrounding the home. High heat capacity in the rammed-earth walls (which are 18 to 36 inches thick) regulates interior temperatures. In winter, the walls work with the slab to retain and radiate the sun’s heat into the home overnight, meaning the gas-fred, in-foor radiant heat is seldom used. Conversely, the home has no air-conditioning because the night air cools the walls in summer —though daily highs often rise into the mid-90s and above. In an architectural sleight of hand, the building—despite its massive walls— seems to hover over a hidden foundation.

“Everyone goes to the rammed earth and feels it. It’s like having a cat—you can touch it all day long.” —Efthimios Maniatis, architect RAMMED EARTH

The rammed-earth walls are up to three feet thick, which helps to keep the house warm enough in the winter that the Downeys rarely bother to activate the in-foor radiant heat (opposite). A landscape designer, Judith Wong, brought the property back

to its natural state as a riverside meadow—one that the Downeys gaze out upon from a deck outside their living room (above). The exterior (left) refects the residents’ request that Maniatis design a house characterized by “glass, openness, simplicity.”

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project Ohio State University, Austin E. Knowlton School of Architecture, Knowlton Hall architect Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects

local architect WSA Studio landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc. location Columbus, Ohio published May 2011

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At 165,000 square feet, Knowlton Hall is large enough to bring Ohio State’s architecture, landscape architecture, and planning programs together under the same roof (left). The open entrance (right) invites the rest of the campus into the school. The architects used marble tiles to build a rain screen for the exterior (bel0w), honoring a donor’s decree to use that material.

text by Miyoko Ohtake photos by Ian Allen

“If you were going to do a building in marble today, how would you do it? We came up with the idea of marble shingles as a rain screen.” —Mack Scogin, architect

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“How do you make a piece of architecture about architecture?” Mack Scogin asks. “That’s a heavy-duty objective.” Nevertheless, his frm, Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects of Atlanta, Georgia, accepted a challenge to design the consummate teaching tool for Ohio State University’s Austin E. Knowlton School of Architecture: a brand-new building. Completed in 2004, Knowlton Hall reunited the architecture, landscape architecture, and planning programs, which had been spread across two buildings fve blocks apart, and revitalized their discourse. A donor mandated that marble be used, reasoning that if it was good enough for the Lincoln Memorial, it was good enough for Ohio State’s architecture school. “We came up with the idea of marble shingles as a rain screen,” Scogin says. “We put them on the building in a way that they can be easily replaced, and they are all individual tiles so that we didn’t have to use any caulk, because that’s where marble always fails.”

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text by Philip Kennicott photos by Zubin Shrof

project Hooper House II architect Marcel Breuer location Baltimore, Maryland published December/January 2009

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Massive feldstone walls frame a glass entrance foyer, which allows tantalizing views through the center of the house (opposite). Built for a wealthy couple in a forest with views of a lake, the house is a rural retreat but only a short drive to the center of Baltimore. The new owner, Richard North, has altered the house very little, though he did convert the carport into an enclosed garage to provide greater protection for his collection of automobiles.

A new owner with a light touch has kept Marcel Breuer’s 1959 Hooper House II a marvel of the mid-20th century whose life will extend well into the 21st.

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There’s a very fne reproduction of a Josef Albers “square” painting hanging in Dr. Richard North’s garage. Granted, it’s being kept company by a Bentley and a Ferrari, but the garage seems a rather undignifed place for it. “Have you ever been married?” North asks by way of explanation. His ex-wife, with whom he is still close, was not a fan of the work. So it ended up in the garage, where it remains. North, a prominent neurosurgeon in Baltimore, has maintained much the same spirit of quiet accommodation with Hooper House II, the modernist gem by Marcel Breuer that he has owned since 1996. Although it was refurbished just before he bought it, the house has changed very little since it was built in 1959 as an idyllic, near-the-city retreat. The house was Breuer’s second for the wealthy art lover Edith Hooper and her husband, Arthur. Old and discolored acoustic tiling was taken down in favor of drywall on the ceiling; a messy oil spill in the basement was cleaned up; and some of the foor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors were replaced. But mostly, it remains as

it was: a long, low house of exquisitely laid feldstone and expanses of glass. It’s a textbook example of Breuer’s classic “binuclear” house, a division of the home into spaces for adults and children. As you enter, through a ten-foot glass gap cut into the stony Zen blankness of the house’s 131-foot-long western wall, you confront an architectural Parents’ Bill of Rights: kids to the left (bedrooms, bath, and a playroom), adults to the right (living room, dining room, kitchen). “You want to live with the children, but you also want to be free from them, and they want to be free from you,” Breuer wrote in 1955, a deliciously dated understanding of the familial balance of power. The youngest of the three great Bauhaus practitioners to work in the United States (Gropius and Mies van der Rohe were the others), Breuer was equally susceptible to his colleagues’ failings: the penchant for pronouncements and the dispiriting late-career work. And it will take a few more revolutions of the cyclical wheel of taste before 148

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buildings such as Breuer’s brutal, expressionist offices for the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington are embraced beyond a coterie of die-hard devotees of midcentury concrete architecture. But his houses—always admired and still remarkably livable, if North’s quiet engagement with the Hooper House is representative—are a diferent matter. In search of a property on which to build his family a new home, North studied maps of the area and discovered an extraordinary pocket of forest that Edith Hooper had acquired decades ago. Before she died, he had tea with her twice in hopes of buying an empty parcel near her home. They sat in the glass-walled living room, dominated by one of Breuer’s trademark, no-two-alike freplaces, with the forest on all sides. It became perfectly clear to North, on both occasions, that the very polite and rather austere Mrs. Hooper (who boiled water with an old-fashioned immersed electric coil) had no desire to sell.

And so, after she died, he bought the house from her heirs, an act in the spirit of Breuer’s pragmatic, if not exactly afectionate, accommodation of adults and children. North then replaced the roof and put glass doors on the freplaces in the children’s playroom and the living room, considered taking down part of a wall to add a pass-through window to the skylighted kitchen (but later thought better of it), added garage doors to the carport, and converted the adjoining stables to make more garage space. “I didn’t know any of the architectural history,” North says. “But I suppose I had an eye for architecture”—an eye inspired, he suggests, by his father’s career as an architect and his mother’s as an artist. His own career as a surgeon has also contributed to his minimally invasive approach to the house. When some of the bluestone fooring began moving underfoot, he talked to a contractor about having it relaid. Discouraged by that consultation, North set about solving the problem himself, using a tiny drill 149

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A large rectangular cut-out in the back wall behind house creates views from the entrance through a courtyard to the trees and lake beyond (above). The courtyard also divides the home into adult and children’s areas, including a playroom. North (opposite bottom) stands outside his glass-walled living room, which also houses his small library of books about Breuer.

and a 60-cc syringe to inject an epoxy under the troublesome pieces. “In this otherwise very quiet setting, it was most disconcerting to have loose stones go bump in the night,” he says. If he didn’t know the house’s history, he does now. North has collected most of the available literature on the house in various languages. Although he originally prized the place as an escape, he is generous about letting the curious inside—the Hooper House has been written up in the local papers several times and extensively photographed. Clearly Edith Hooper’s vision retains the power to inspire: Shortly after it was built, Architectural Record praised its “forceful simplicity.” Subsequently, other writers have noted something “archaic” about it. And when Italian photographer Luisa Lambri shot it a few years ago, she said, “It was a very moody place, and it had a lonely feeling that was sort of sad.” These responses seem part of an ongoing misreading of the Hooper House, a view that casts it as an inert and ideal icon of its times rather than something organic and mutable. The “forceful simplicity” of it is all there in the plans. On paper, its rectangular form can be summarized with a few bold lines, a thick wall of stone on the west, a square courtyard with a rectangular opening cut in its eastern wall, and glass pretty much everywhere else. One expects a harsh study in contrasts, hard stone next to transparent glass, and perhaps the worst of both materials: cold solidity and naked transparency, a bunker with a view. But sit in the Hooper House at sunset and the clear, simple forms so obvious from the plans begin to blur. Shadows gather, the dining room merges with the greenery outside, and quiet envelops the house. The “archaic” stone walls soften, taking on new textures, and their very mass feels like an embrace. It isn’t so much a “moody place” as a place of many moods, each room diferent, connected to the whole as a chain of spaces rather than articulations of a grand idea. Breuer once quoted LaoTzu’s Tao Te Ching to describe his understanding of architecture: “Though doors and windows may be cut to make a house, the essence of the house is the emptiness within it.” Lambri was half right: It is a study in a kind of emptiness, but hardly a sort of sad one. As organizations such as the National Trust for Historic Preservation champion the cause of midcentury-modern houses—searching for wealthy buyers who won’t raze or expand them beyond recognition— North’s marriage to Hooper House is a happy accident. It was a place, green and apart, that he was seeking when he discovered it. Every Breuer house is a response to a site, a union of the man-made and the natural. The Hooper House, with its feldstone walls and forest setting, feels as if it were charmed out of the landscape, and it has in turn charmed its owner. A real estate agent might ask why the bedrooms are so small, why there are no windows in the playroom, why the bathroom is so very out of date. To which the current owner might reply, philosophically, “Have you ever been married?” 150

“In this very quiet setting, it was most disconcerting to have loose stones go bump in the night.”—Richard North, resident

The house, which was completed in 1959, was refurbished before North bought it in 1996, but it still includes some of Breuer’s original built-in furniture, including the desk in the bedroom (opposite top), as well as a chair designed by the architect. North, whose children are grown, remodeled the playroom (opposite bottom), illuminated by skylights, into a reading and television space.

The main bathroom (right) is a vision from the past and hasn’t been updated with contemporary fxtures. Three stark planes make the dining room (below) a place of sun and shadow: a wall of rock, a foor of bluestone, and a sheer slice of glass. The tubular steel dining chairs, which Breuer also designed, add a further element of unity to the interior design of the house.

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Marcel Breuer A Breuer expert, Isabelle Hyman, examines the architect’s legacy and the ways that his designs continue to infuence, well into the 21st century.

text by Philip Kennicott photos by Zubin Shrof

What recent building owes a debt to Breuer’s work? I would say the 2003 Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati by Zaha Hadid.

What were his greatest contributions to architecture in the United States? His best buildings—especially some of the great churches he built in the Midwest. His love of concrete, and his mastery of that material’s sculptural potential. His infuence as a professor in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, where he taught a generation of American modernist architects.

What is the most obscure fact about him? Although Breuer drove all the time and commuted by automobile between his home in New Canaan, Connecticut, and his ofce in New York, he was a famously bad driver. In 1931, when he left Germany to “get away from the mid-European depression,” he went on a car trip to Spain and North Africa. He reported in a letter to Ise Gropius that “no one passed me between Berlin and Barcelona.”

Nestled between two stone walls, the glass entrance (top right) frames views of the house’s natural setting. A vintage photograph of the playroom (above) shows Breuer’s

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unique freplace and carefully placed skylight. The courtyard (opposite) captures nature within the embrace of the house, a “room” of green that is at once indoors and out.

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Isabelle Hyman, professor emeritus in the art history department at New York University, is the author of Marcel Breuer, Architect: The Career and the Buildings.

What was his biggest failure? Breuer’s biggest failure was averted, but it would have been the 1967–1969 project to demolish the Beaux Arts facade of New York’s Grand Central Terminal and to construct a huge commercial tower on the site. The project did not go forward. 153

The breathtaking fberglass exterior of Cat Macleod and Michael Bellemo’s house in Melbourne, Australia, is printed with supersize images of a sculpture created by the residents. Casting muchneeded greenery onto a grungy alley, the semi-opaque Ampelite Webglas cladding shields the house from the street while allowing light to permeate indoors.

as told to Karen Pakula photos by Prue Ruscoe

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Michael Bellemo and Cat Macleod took on the art of architecture when they printed an image of one of their works onto corrugated plastic and used it to clad their split-level home.

Architect-sculptor double act Cat Macleod and Michael Bellemo’s Melbourne house is also home to their practice, Bellemo & Cat. The split-level cube is wrapped in a printed facade that applies a fattened sculptural motif to fberglass (a reinforced plastic embedded with glass fbers). Macleod describes the making of her family’s multifunctional sanctuary, including its creative use of plastics. We wanted to start from scratch so it’s all totally personalized. When we found the land, we actually liked the grungy nature of it in the back of a laneway. It was small, afordable, and instantly an architectural challenge. There are lots of artists [around], so we thought we could also run a business from here.

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This house is a big rectangle with a print on it. And with all the green, it’s very peaceful in here. It’s a bit tropical, like being in an artifcial garden in some ways. As sculptors, we actually build quite big things that don’t have to be signed of as buildings, so we get to play around with form, and that’s great because we feed that information back into our practice. We had a lot to put in the house: Our ofce, two kids, ofsite parking, and we had to get a balcony or some sort of outdoors area. But it never feels like you’re in a box because of all the level changes. We’ve got a garage between the ofce space and the home, and we’ve got two separate doors. It’s like Get Smart. You go through one door, close it, then you go through the other door, and then you’re in the ofce. Just having the garage in between gives you a bufer, from an acoustic point of view and the physical distance. Instead of putting the living areas on the ground foor we put them on the upper foors so you get the light and the view and the sense of removal from the immediate environment. We wanted the kids in our living space but not in our face, not under our feet. The kids are four and six, and here they’re within eyeshot. Their room is a little bit of a den, and they have their own deck out there. We were going to have them sleeping in some sort

of pod, then we realized it was a bit too close. The bedroom downstairs is tiny, but they’re tiny people. And they’re happy there. When they grow, we’ll probably go up to the next level. Our older child, who is 19, lives around the corner. As architects we often design split-levels, but we haven’t done stairs that are also seats like here. They’ve become an important transition space from the grown-up zone. One of the advantages of being the owner-builder and also the way that we work is that we allowed ourselves a reasonable amount of fexibility. But there are only three materials in the whole house—–the Laminex is the same, the tiles are the same, and the exterior cladding comes inside through the walls. And there are three paint colors—–white, turquoise, and apple green. It is so much clearer when you’ve just got the one exterior material. Using Astroturf outside on the deck was a cost issue. Also, there’s too much trafc for what would be a small strip of grass. Our kids are running up there all the time, and Michael plays bocce. We’ve arranged the house just how we like it, and it’s the warmest, lightest house I’ve ever lived in. You know, we could have bought an amazing painting, but we chose to make our own artwork of the whole building instead.

Macleod got crafty, weaving a privacy wall for the lofted master bedroom out of white engineering felt (opposite). The screen is at once soft and industrial in feel and can be replaced inexpensively at any time. An Artemide Castore suspension light illuminates both the bedroom behind and kitchen below.

“We could have bought an amazing painting, but we chose to make our own artwork of the whole building instead.”—Cat Macleod, resident

A midcentury Australian sofa (right) discovered at a fea market and vibrant, eclectic art soften the architectural edges of the living room. The eye-catching kitchen cabinets behind Celeste and Macleod (above) were custom-built in lemon Liri Laminate by Amerind. The island bench is made from the same alpine ash used on the foor and stairs.

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Chicago architect Jeanne Gang of Studio Gang was called in for a more substantial renovation following a surface makeover; she added the home’s most unusual feature: a dazzlingly porous brick screen. The living room (opposite) is an all-white, minimalist counterpoint to the lively exterior shell.

Born as a horse stable, a brick house in Chicago is all about transportation and transparency. A clever renovation and some unusual cladding have made it the most compelling architecture on the block.

text by Blair Kamin photos by Gregg Segal

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project Brick Weave House architect Studio Gang Architects location Chicago, Illinois published October 2009

Designed for advertising executives David Hernandez and Tereasa Surratt, the Brick Weave House is located in gentrifying West Town, about two miles northwest of Chicago’s Loop. The house’s name comes from its most distinctive feature, a tall, two-sided, technically adventurous brick screen that shelters a walled garden and gives the owners the privacy they crave while letting honeycomb patterns of natural light pour inside. At night, the brick screen becomes a dazzling light box. Architect Jeanne Gang’s frst big renovation move subtracted an 800-square-foot chunk of the house’s front, making room for the brick screen and walled garden. The screen, made of Norman bricks with custom-made hardware in the joints, is supported by steel columns and beams that extend outward from the roof as well as horizontal trusses embedded in mortar. It is the latest in Gang’s experiments with materials, making what is heavy and solid seem light, almost porous. “It’s not a wall; people come and stare through,” Gang says. The house is more social than it seems on account of its street-facing garage, which lets the couple visit with neighbors.

For their weekend home in Northern California, Dagny Maidman and Molly Wood looked to the land for inspiration (opposite). “It’s more about the outside and experiencing how beautiful nature is,” Maidman says. The couple hired architect Michael Cobb to design the abode.

He thoughtfully deployed environmentally conscious materials—from the structure to the fnishes—to craft the restrained residence. Maidman and Wood lounge on a Laguna chair and sofa from Room & Board on their rear patio (below). CB2’s Chelsea table and chairs sit to the right.

In early 2002, Dagny Maidman, a fnancial adviser for a San Francisco securities frm, decided to sell her weekend house in Healdsburg, California. Though a great investment, it wasn’t a perfect getaway. She described her fantasy to her real estate agent: something closer to nature, with varied ecology and, preferably, a few cottages, to remind her of the camp in Maine where she spent summers growing up. As they readied the house for sale, Maidman remembers her agent telling her, “I think your dream property just came on the market.” At just over six acres, the parcel outside Healdsburg was nestled in a shady grove threaded by a creek, and it included two cottages, a barn, and a toolshed. Redwoods and Douglas frs kept the grove cool, and the plot of land boasted a sun-blasted hill that looked ideal for a pool—and maybe one day her dream house. Maidman bought the property in July 2002 and turned the two-bed-room cottage into her new weekend retreat. Then she started to ponder building a house on the hilltop. It took ten years until the new abode—a three-bedroom, two-story structure built with environmentally conscious materials—was complete. In 2003, Maidman found a kindred spirit in Michael Cobb, a University of Pennsylvania architecture graduate whom she hired for some basic site planning. “We walked around the property and he seemed very down to earth and into the earthiness that I was interested in,” Maidman recalls. He also wanted to let a design unfold that would ft the land.

text by Emily Kaiser Thelin photos by Drew Kelly project Healdsburg House architect Michael Cobb, Studio Ecesis location Healdsburg, California

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eSIP

Fiber Rich A wine country hideaway stays cool in the hot California summers and warm in the chilly winters thanks to eSIPs, structural insulated panels made of wood and straw.

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The following year, on the sunny hill, Maidman married Molly Wood, an educator and former middle school principal. In 2005, Maidman and Cobb started brainstorming ideas for the house. Maidman knew she wanted “a lot of glass, concrete, and wood from the property.” She also liked the idea of something open and spare so she could “see out, to have the house disappear, and experience the outside from the inside,” she says. “I wanted to keep everything as simple as possible.” By 2009, Maidman and Cobb had devised a plan for a rectangular, 2,046-square-foot residence, and construction began in the summer of 2010. They separated the plan into public and private zones: The upstairs houses the family’s three bedrooms, which each open onto a shared deck, while the downstairs features a great room with living and dining areas anchored by a corner kitchen. The foor-to-ceiling glass along the south-facing wall on the lower level opens the house to the surrounding property, while wide Douglas fr planks and concrete line the rest of the space. The kitchen cabinets double as a functional

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accent wall; they are coated with a vibrant green conversion varnish that echoes the colors of the landscape, which can get lush during the winter rains. The bedroom walls were fashioned from spare drywall to lower costs, then painted white to “frame nature,” as Maidman puts it. Each room becomes a gallery, the view to the outdoors the art. To cope with the blazing sun, Cobb designed exterior retractable shades to shield the upstairs glass pocket doors and windows, and positioned the second-story deck so it casts shade over the ground foor’s glass walls. To frame and insulate the house, Cobb persuaded Maidman to try eSIPs—prefabricated structural insulated panels with compressed wheat or rice straw in lieu of polystyrene at the core—which he praises for their low environmental impact. Cobb used eSIPs from Agriboard Industries, a Texas company whose exceptionally thick panels contain two three-and-ahalf-inch compressed agricultural-fber boards each. The walls, which are terrifc insulators, are also thick enough to accommodate the exterior retractable shades Cobb had planned for the second story. ESIPs

Healdsburg House First Floor Plan

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Kitchen Dining Area Living Area Laundry Room Bathroom Mechanical Room Covered Parking Storage Patio

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The house is predominantly glass, concrete, and wood, which was harvested onsite from Douglas fr trees that needed to be cut down. Maidman sits on a Room & Board Hutton sofa (left). The custom sliding door features hardware from the Real Carriage Door Company.

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The kitchen and living areas occupy the ground foor; Magis chairs surround a table that Maidman’s brother-inlaw, Andrew McGraw, crafted from old water tanks found on the property. Reliance Fine Finishing coated the kitchen cabinets with green-tinted conversion varnish.

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“It’s a belief in many communities that a good building has no more than three materials.”—Michael Cobb, architect

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dwell.com/healdsburg-house Visit our website for more details on using Agriboard at home.

“The repetitiveness of the materials allows the house to ‘fall away’ so that you can sit inside and really experience the outside.”—Dagny Maidman, resident

were so new that Cobb had to fle for an alternativebuilding-methods permit. To meet California’s stringent earthquake codes, he and Maidman also hired a structural engineer to evaluate the design. “Contractors tried to dissuade us from using it,” Maidman says of the panels, “because they didn’t know how to calculate its costs.” Ultimately, it was the panels’ performance, not their environmental bona fdes, that swayed her. The sunny hill gets hot in the summers; she needed a house that could keep its cool. Zoning laws required the house to have an insulation rating, or R-value, of at least 13, but Agriboard’s eSIPS gave it an R-value of 25, exceeding the requirement. With any client considering eSIPs, Cobb stresses that the permitting process can be complex and the initial costs can be higher—around eight dollars per surface square foot, 10 to 15 percent more than the baseline for conventional wood framing. But “operational costs will be less in the long run,” he says. Maidman also took bids for conventional timber construction with the equivalent degree of insulation, 164

Cobb used a single waler snap-tie concrete forming system to create the walls surrounding the Rais Rondo wood-burning stove (above). A Design Within Reach Photon rug lies in front of Otis swivel chairs from Room & Board.

Warm-toned plaster sheathes the exterior (opposite, below). The color plays of of the clay soil’s natural hue. “Every decision we made came back to how to get something to its most essential, basic tenets,” Maidman says.

and found the cost about the same. With so much insulation, she and Wood debated installing heating or air conditioning. They ultimately decided to do so, erring on the side of guaranteed comfort. The eSIPs presented a challenge only in the fnal design stages. Because all the windows, conduits, and chases are built into the panels in the factory, Maidman and Cobb used a computer to plot out the precise location of every light switch. The advance work paid of. “It’s part of the prefab approach,” Cobb says. “Changes at the schematic stage cost pennies; in the construction process, they cost dollars.” By December 2011, the house was ready. Last summer, the couple turned on the air conditioning only twice. When asked if she’d build the house with eSIPs if she had to do it over again, Maidman pauses. “I would,” she says. “We have all that glass, and we get a ton of sun there, yet when it’s 100 degrees outside, it’s less than 80 inside. People always think it’s air-conditioned when it’s not. Upstairs it gets hotter, around 85 degrees. But that’s still pretty great.” MATERIAL SOURCEBOOK

Design 101: eSIPs The mighty duo of heat and pressure transforms agricultural waste from the rice and wheat industries into eSIPs, a sustainable building material. Structural insulated panels, or SIPs, are an economical, prefabricated alternative to timber framing, but they’re not environmentally friendly. Each panel is like an Oreo cookie, with outer layers of rigid materials—like oriented strand board, metal, and concrete—and a core of expanded polystyrene. An alternative has emerged in eSIPs: “ecological” SIPs with a core made from compressed agricultural fiber, or CAF, instead of petroleum-based Styrofoam. CAF boards are made with debris from rice or wheat production that would otherwise get tilled or burned. When

compressed and heated to about 400 degrees, lignin—a naturally occurring compound in the straw—turns to glue and holds the material together. The material has a negative carbon footprint and there is no off-gassing, a boon for the environment. These tightly bound fibers make CAF panels extraordinary fire retardants and insulators, both acoustic and thermal. When sandwiched between two oriented strand boards, eSIPs can withstand tornado-force winds. Stramit USA, based in Texas, is a leading manufacturer. It recently rolled out CAF-Rock, a compressed-straw alternative to drywall. Stramit USA’s biggest customers are currently fastfood chains, but the company sees a day when CAF panels will replace conventional SIPs just as the nail gun replaced the hammer.

eSIP

888.823.8883

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EXPERIENCE MODERN FIRE | BOL CORTEN

project House BVA architect dmvA Architecten location Turnhout, Belgium published May 2012 The only true opening in the facade of Yves Borghs and Katleen van Ammel’s house in Turnhout, Belgium, is the door. The seven tall, slim windows are screened by what architect Tom Verschueren calls “knitted” bricks. “In this part of Belgium, 90 percent of the houses are built with brick,” he says. “It’s a classic material that we tried to use in a totally diferent way.”

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Yves Borghs and Katleen van Ammel wanted their new house to ofer maximum privacy but also maximum daylight. Tom Verschueren of Mechelen, Belgium-based dmvA Architecten proposed a closed street-side facade and an open back side facing the garden, totally glazed from the ground to the saddleback roof. Out front, brown bricks were selected to match the roof tiles, presenting a monochrome look relieved only by the red door frame. Because of the couple’s low budget, the interior is plain and unadorned, but a bright red glass hallway links the street to the garden, adding a warm, striking touch. “The garden is big and the family puts their bikes there, so they needed an access corridor,” Verschueren says. “Building a wall seemed a pity.” 167

FACADE FOCUS

text by Jane Sitza photo by Frederik Vercruysse

A Belgian couple’s two-story house makes creative use of a local staple—brick—to maximize both privacy and light.

BRICK

Knitted Pattern

11  Wood Q&A Sebastian Mariscal Studio sebastianmariscal.com Knotty by Nature Bornstein Lyckefors Arkitekter bornsteinlyckefors.se Blue in the Facade YH2 Studios yh2architecture.com Wood Drift Page Goolrick Architect goolrick.com Merit Builders meritbuildersllc.com Stacy Paetzel, Marshall Paetzel Landscape Architecture mplastudio.com Woodwork by Ciufo Cabinetry ciufocabinetry.com Dean sectional sofa by Room & Board roomandboard.com Vintage Boomerang chair by Peter Hvidt and Orla MølgaardNielsen for France & Søn from R.E. Steele Antiques 1stdibs.com Branching Bubble chandelier by Lindsey Adelman Studio lindseyadelman.com Boi wall sconces by David Weeks Studio davidweeksstudio.com Bed linens by Dwell Studio dwellstudio.com Sconces by Jieldé jieldeusa.com Back in Black Fujimori Terunobu Architecture by Terunobu Fujimori (Toto Shuppan, 2007) from William Stout Architectural Books stoutbooks.com Facade Focus: Stacked Wood Uni Architecture uni-a.com Carrera marble tiles olympiamarble.com Core tile fastfoors.com Polycarbonate from Polygal polygal.com All hardware, appliances, windows, doors, and lumber available at Home Depot homedepot.com

The architects, products, furniture, designers, materials, and builders featured in this issue.

168

MATERIAL SOURCEBOOK

41  Metal Q&A Olson Kundig Architects olsonkundigarchitects.com Tightly Knit Russell Thomsen, IDEA ofce ideaofce.net Scrap House Rockside Campbell Design Inc. 705-446-2506 VanEyk Custom Woodworks 519-928-9893 Cabinetry by Jeremy Van Severen of Coates Creek Cabinetry coatescreekcabinetry.com Steel fabrication by Endeman’s Ironcraft 519-941-2876 Sheet-metal fabrication by Andex Metal Products Ltd. andex.ca Windows by E&W Windows and Doors 416-798-1202 Stainless steel countertops, sink, and workbenches by Perfect Stainless perfectstainless.com Stone countertops by City Stone citystone.com Xeros Efect Blank Studio blankspaces.net Skin Deep Periphery Architecture peripheryprojects.com Reinke Shakes reinkeshakes.com

PHOTO BY VICTOR PRADO, PROP STYLING BY LAUREN SHIELDS

Abiquiu Debut Anderson Anderson Architecture andersonandersonarchitecture.com Steel cladding by Mesa Steel 505-474-6811 Spiral staircase by The Iron Shop theironshop.com Duo-Pane insulating glass windows and doors by Western Window Systems westernwindowsystems.com Facade Focus: Screening for Attention BoetzkesHelder boetzkeshelder.nl

73  Glass Q&A Thomas Phifer and Partners thomasphifer.com Living Edge Bercy Chen Studio bcarc.com Mezzanine and stairs fabricated by Steel House MFG steelhousemfg.com

Ace in the Home Andrew Maynard Architects maynardarchitects.com Hope Floats Givone Home givonehome.com Touch of Glass Taalman Koch Architecture taalmankoch.com Bosch aluminium framing system from Automation Controls boschrexroth-us.com automationcontrols.com Door glass and windows from Metal Window Corp. metalwindowcorp.com FiberTite roofng membrane system fbertite.com Solar panels by Evergreen Solar evergreensolar.com Wall panels by Polygal polygal.com Roofng by Epic Metals corp. epicmetals.com Custom cabinetry and carved wood block by Architects and Systems 32 310-677-8490 Resin panel by 3Form 3-form.com Facade Focus: Shedded Bliss Linda Bergroth lindabergroth.com Avanto Architects avan.to Kekkilä kekkila.f

105  Concrete Q&A Marcio Kogan, Studio MK27 marciokogan.com.br Eggo Centric A69 a69.cz Wooden interiors and walk-in closet by Woodface woodface.cz Windows by Star Okna star-okna.cz Oak foors by Podlahy Šesták podlahy-sestak.cz Vitro tiles from Ceramic Industries ceramic.co.za Swiss Mix Felix Oesch oesch.com Prefab built by Elsaesser-Beton elsaesser-beton.de Built by Egg Bau eggbau.ch Prefab system by Syspro syspro.de Cabinetry by Robert Fehr AG r-fehrag.ch

Snake Charmer 51-1 Arquitectos 51-1.com Nathan Pereira Arquitectura y Diseno 51-1-222-2825 Exterior coating by Graniplast graniplast.com.co Flooring by Quimica Suiza qsindustrial.biz/es Katz’s Cradle Gregory Katz Architecture gregorykatz.co.za Concrete by LaFarge lafarge.com All-fold glazed doors by World of Windows worldofwindows.co.za Kitchen cabinets by Heavenly Kitchens heavenlykitchens.co.za Facade Focus: Rough Cuts Guilherme Machado Vaz guilhermemachadovaz.com

137  The Extras Q&A Richard Meier & Partners Architects richardmeier.com Earth Moves Studio eM Design studioemdesign.com Construction by Sims General Building simsgeneralbuilding.com Engineered fll for rammed earth from Lafarge North America nucanm.org/lafarge.html Pitched Cor-Ten steel roof by Western State Decking metaldeck.com Membrane by High Desert Roofng desertmesa.com Klassik surface mounted sliding door track unit by Bartels bartelsusa.com Eucalyptus hardwood fooring by Antiquity LLC santafeheritagedoors.com Ipe hardwood decking from Plaza Hardwood Inc. plzfoor.com Low-E glass windows installed by Striker Enterprizes 505-881-1292 Ahead of Its Class Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects msmearch.com WSA Studio wsastudio.com Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc. mvvainc.com Stone Classic Marcel Breuer marcelbreuer.org Jonathan Foster Architect nyarchitect.com

Plastic Fantastic Bellemo & Cat bellemocat.com Durolite Webglass by Dimond dimond.co.nz Sheet-timber fooring by Big River Timbers bigrivertimbers.com.au Liri laminate by Amerind amerind.com.au Fiberglass panels by Ampelite ampelite.com.au Brick By Brick Studio Gang studiogang.net Windows and sliding doors by Arcadia arcadiaproducts.com Fiber Rich Michael Cobb Studio Ecesis studioecesis.com Stan Chapman Chapman Construction chapmanconstruction.net StramitUSA stramitusa.com Hutton sofa, Otis chairs, Laguna sofa and lounge chairs, Emmet lounge chairs, and Waikiki umbrella by Room & Board roomandboard.com Air-Chair by Jasper Morrison for Magis store.hermanmiller.com Photon rug by Design Within Reach dwr.com Rondo wood-burning stove by Rais us.rais.com Lighting fxtures by Baselite baselite.com Ceiling fans by the Modern Fan Company modernfan.com Refrigerator and dishwasher by LG lg.com Range by GE ge.com Kitchen faucet by Grohe grohe.com Facade Focus: Knitted Pattern dmvA Architecten dmva-architecten.be

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